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A garden large enough for one of those super sized trampolines and a tree house. A local school that’s both undersubscribed and Ofsted-rated outstanding. A house big enough for a guest bedroom for visiting friends and a study. The advantages of leaving the city for the country when children come along seem endless.

Which is why, in 2013, when our eldest daughter was two and I was seven months pregnant with our second, my husband and I left our south east London flat, with its tiny garden and shared driveway, and moved to a five bedroom detached house in a sleepy Surrey village.

On our first night, I marvelled at how quiet it was (in London we lived on a busy bus route) and walked from spacious room to spacious room, feeling confident we’d made the best decision for our growing family. A few weeks later, however, I cried, fearing we’d made the worst.

I felt lonely, bored and isolated. But it wasn't just about me: I also feared that, rather than giving my children an idyllic Darling Buds of May childhood, I’d saddled them with an uninspiring, boring one, that involved driving absolutely everywhere just to see people or buy milk.