a day ago
London leaver: 'we swapped a Battersea townhouse for 25 acres near the Devon coast'
Until quite recently Jenny and Ed Henderson's only pet-owning experience was with a couple of gerbils and rats when they were students.
Today the couple and their two sons care for a menagerie including four cows, four pigs, four goats, two peacocks, and 19 chickens at their Exmoor smallholding.
Once Loki, seven, and Bodhi, three, are up and ready for school and nursery Jenny turns her attention to the animals, distributing breakfasts, letting the hens out, and making sure all is well.
'The goats are the worst,' she says. 'You never know when one of them will get its head stuck in the fence, and they are real escape artists.'
Life was very different back in London, where Jenny, 40 was getting increasingly burned out working as a primary school teacher, and Ed, also 40, was a freelance photographer and videographer.
The couple had met at boarding school in Dorset and they got an early start on the property ladder, buying their four-bedroom Victorian house in Battersea back in 2003 when they were both students and taking in lodgers to help pay the mortgage.
But London was never their lifelong plan.
'It had always been in our heads that we wanted to live by the sea, and to be out of London once kids came along,' says Jenny.
They made their first escape attempt early in the pandemic in the hopes of being able to move before Loki started school, but they found the great race for space when half of the city appeared to be moving to the coast too hot to handle.
'Everything in the South West was going for crazy money and nobody wanted to buy our London house so after about a year we took it off the market again,' says Jenny.
They made their second attempt in 2023. This time they were able to sell their Battersea home for just over £1 million.
The family then spent several months staying with a series of family and friends before, in October 2023, they spent £1.35 million on Heale Farm – a traditional Devon farmhouse with around 25 acres of land, and three holiday cottages near the village of Parracombe, about four miles from the coast (
'After getting burnt out with the stress and demands of the education system I decided to leave teaching, so our focus was to find somewhere that would bring me some income,' explains Jenny.
The family has found locals friendly and welcoming – their neighbours are farmers who have helped teach them how to care for their livestock, the boys are happy at the tiny village school and with the fact they can go to the beach after school, and Parracombe has a shop and a pub.
'We were a bit nervous before we moved about what people would think of these London blow-ins,' says Jenny.
'But everyone has been friendly and welcoming. We have really thrown ourselves into the community – I am a parent governor at the school and we shop locally and use the local pubs – but I still feel really lucky in that respect.
'Do we have any regrets about leaving London? None at all.'
