It is 5am in the Lincolnshire countryside. Blythe Cranfield’s alarm is shrieking and she’s out of bed and hurrying to get ready for work – which is 100 miles away in central London.

Her twice-weekly long distance commute starts with a 20-minute drive to Stamford Station, followed by a train to Peterborough, and then a change onto another bound for London King’s Cross. Once in the capital, she jumps on the tube, heading for Marylebone, and then she walks to the office.

In all, the journey costs around £55 and the round trip takes around five hours.

The payback for all this time and money is that it gives Cranfield the chance to live deep in the country and spend her downtime immersed in nature.

“I was brought up on a farm, and my dream was always to come back to the country,” she says. “The pandemic just massively accelerated being able to do it.”

Epically long commutes have become an increasingly common phenomenon post-pandemic, fuelled by widespread hybrid and home working. A recent study by Forbes Advisor found that almost four in 10 people still work from home while a quarter attend the office on a part-time basis.

Estate agent Hamptons reports that long-distance commutes are “becoming the norm”. More than one in four households moving out of London so far this year put more than 100 miles between themselves and their offices.

Before the pandemic, less than one in six moved so far away, with the majority preferring to stay in the Home Counties. 

A study by estate agent Winkworth also found that buyers are routinely willing to tolerate two-hour commutes in order to live in beautiful settings with good schools – even if the cost of getting to the office as and when means they have less to spend on their property.

‘My quality of life is better here’

100 mile commute from Lincolnshire, five hours, £55 return

Before the pandemic, Cranfield and a friend rented a flat in Fulham, west London. Her journey to work as a PR took around 45 minutes.

When the pandemic began, she was sent home and found the experience overwhelming. “I found being in the flat at the start of the pandemic so claustrophobic,” says Cranfield, 27.

“There were two of us, both working from home, and we had just one open-plan kitchen and living room, and our bedrooms. Our only outside space was a tiny patio which was completely overlooked by all the other flats. There was just no space and no privacy.”

As soon as she was allowed to travel, Cranfield sought refuge at the family farm in Lincolnshire. She imagined staying for a few weeks but when work from home evolved into hybrid working she realised that there was no real reason to return to her circa £1,000 per month room in London.

Besides, by that time, she had met her boyfriend, and they were talking about buying a place together.

“My quality of life is better here,” says Cranfield. “Why on earth would I want to go back to London? I think I am just a countryside girl at heart.”

When not commuting, Cranfield’s life now revolves around the outdoors – walking with her Jack Russell terrier, Spud – running, cycling, and horse riding. “It feels very wholesome,” she says.

And in June she and her boyfriend bought their first home – a three-bedroom stone cottage in a peaceful village which cost circa £500,000 – around the same price as a studio flat in Fulham.

Sometimes all the travelling leaves Cranfield feeling exhausted.

“I really love my job – I think if that was not the case I might not be willing to do the travelling,” she says. “But I also thrive on being busy so my personality quite fits doing this too. I hate not having plans. And when I wake up on a Saturday morning I am in the middle of nowhere, and I can breathe. In London I had busy weeks and busy weekends too.”

‘It does sound nuts, but it works’

196 miles from Devon, three-and-a-half hours, £72+ return plus hotel

Kenny Campbell covers even longer distances than Cranfield – he splits his life between Devon, central London, and the Highlands of Scotland, regularly clocking up seven hours’ travel in a single day to get to work.

Until 2015, Campbell’s working life was done the old-fashioned way. He lived and worked in London and commuted, daily, to his desk at a public relations firm.

Then he was offered a new job and a new-fangled-sounding set-up – working from home. This allowed him to move out of the capital and to the Brecon Beacons in Wales, working for a regional company where most of his clients were local and his travel requirements negligible.

Things changed again when Campbell, 56, met his partner, who lives in Topsham, Devon, and moved in with her just over two years ago. At around the same time, he had decided to sell his house in Wales and buy a new home in Scotland, at the foot of Ben Nevis, close to his parents and sister.

He was also setting up his own PR firm, Pepshop, which requires his regular presence in the capital. He then started to produce a political podcast, Quiet Riot, which is recorded in London every Wednesday afternoon, just to add an extra layer of complication into his life.

“It does sound nuts, but once you have got the psychology of it right, it works,” he says. “I view the trip to London not as a commute but as a city break. Rather than commute every day of the week, all I am doing is boiling those journey times down into a single day or two.”

What all this means in practical terms is that Campbell arranges his London meetings around the podcast, in order to compress his work into one or two working days.

He first makes a 15-minute drive to Cranbrook station, selected because of its plentiful, free parking. He then gets on a train to London Waterloo, which takes three-and-a-quarter hours on a good day, trying to avoid peak times to keep his rail fare down. The cheapest single fare is £36.

“Earlier or later they can be three times that,” says Campbell.

He then walks across Waterloo Bridge to Somerset House, where the podcast is recorded. After that, it is either a return train home, treating the train as his mobile office and working from the carriage. If he has enough meetings to justify an overnight trip, he will stay over in a no-frills hotel – booking late for the best rates and rarely spending more than £100.

“The only rules are that it has to be ensuite, and have a door which locks,” he says. “I’m looking for something habitable, and cheap as chips.” Dinner, if he’s not meeting friends, could be supermarket sandwiches or a pub meal.

Campbell believes his routine, interspersed with regular visits to the Highlands to see family and go hill walking, is perfectly sustainable, although he admits that his quality of life would be better if he didn’t need to be in London quite so often.

“Nobody wants to spend time on the train, but I get a surprising amount of work done, and once you get your head around it it is OK,” he says. “It helps if you are OK with your own company. It can be an admin challenge, but it means I can live and work where I need and want to be.”

‘It is really exhausting’

1,041 miles from Malaga, three hours, £50-£150 return plus Airbnb

Superficially, Charlotte Ferguson’s long-distance lifestyle sounds incredibly glamorous. She runs her own luxury skincare business, Disciple London, and only spends between two and four days per month in its west London office.

The rest of the time Ferguson, 41, her husband John Quilter, 52, and their Doberman greyhound cross, Toast, live just outside Malaga, Spain. They spend their time on the beach, or enjoying the fabulous cuisine of Andalucia, and generally living the good life for a fraction of what it would cost in the UK.

Before the pandemic, Ferguson and Quilter were renting a home in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

“It was the second lockdown, it was getting a bit cold and miserable in the UK, and we just started talking about trying something else,” says Ferguson. “We looked at Airbnb, and we found this place in Andalucia. We decided to book it for three months, the longest we could go without a visa, and put our things in storage, packed up the dog and the coffee machine, and got in the car.”

The couple returned to reality, in a rental near Oxford, in January 2021. The winter lockdown was underway and they missed Spain so much they decided to move there. They now live in a four-bedroom house just outside Malaga.

Ferguson’s team can hold the fort in London, and every week or two, she makes a flying visit to the office, getting on a plane at 7.30am and reaching her desk by 10.30am. She then stays over with her parents, who live near Brentford, or in the Airbnb she regularly rents and which costs £80.

She uses her evening in London to catch up with friends or meet with journalists. The following day she is back at the office at 8am, and on a plane again in the early afternoon, getting home in time to enjoy a glass of wine in a beach bar.

Travel costs vary depending on the time of year, but over the winter if she books early enough, Ferguson can get a return ticket for around £50.

“It is less than my train from Henley used to be, which is bonkers.” In the high season she pays around £150 for the trip.

Meanwhile, rent in Spain comes in at £1,400 per month, and there is no council tax to pay, meaning living expenses are far lower than in the UK. The couple’s rent alone in Henley was around £2,200 per month.

But despite the financial sense it makes, Ferguson and Quilter are currently discussing a return to the UK. They have struggled to make close friends in Spain, and miss their London circle. Ferguson is keen to grow the business and feels that as a largely absentee boss she isn’t doing her best for the company either.

And then there is the travelling. “It is really exhausting,” she says. “Airports are really stressful places, and it just seeps into the atmosphere. You can do small things like having a lounge membership and not checking a bag, but it does take a toll.”

Exactly how they will reshape their lives remains to be seen. Quilter, a writer, is training to be a psychotherapist, a job he can do online, so he is completely flexible. One option they are kicking around is staying put and hiring a senior manager for her business. Another would be to return to the UK with regular breaks overseas, although they are worried about the culture shock.

“Spain has such a different culture to the UK, such a different view of the work-life balance, that I do think coming back to somewhere where everyone is so stressed all the time would be really, really hard,” says Ferguson.

‘We both have the freedom to work less if we choose to’

103 miles from Great Malvern, three-and-a-half hours, £110 return

Gary Crotaz and his wife, Mildred Yuan-Crotaz, are right at the start of their long-distance commuting lifestyle. Right now they can’t imagine going back to their old life, living in a modern townhouse in St Albans, Hertfordshire, a 20-minute train hop from their respective former offices in central London.

Their new home is a historic four-bedroom cottage with around an acre of garden some four miles from Great Malvern, Worcestershire, which they share with their two Pomeranian dogs.

Before making the move in June, both Crotaz and Yuan-Crotaz did plenty of groundwork to transform the way they worked. Yuan-Crotaz, 42, left her job with a major international talent agency and set as an independent. Crotaz, 47, quit the executive team at department store Selfridges in 2020, and has started working as a speaker and executive coach.

These changes allowed the couple to begin working primarily from home, freeing them from the need to be within a realistic daily commute of the capital. They then asked themselves a big question. “Is it possible to halve our monthly costs, and where would we have to live to do that?”

The Malvern Hills – beautiful, close to some friends who had already moved out, and with good train services to London – ticked all their boxes, and they found they got plenty of bang for their buck.

Their old house sold for around £1.1m and the new house, which needs work, cost £620,000. With a smaller mortgage and no service charge to pay, Crotaz estimates that they are around £3,000 better off per month as a result of the move, which means they can afford to take holidays and upgrade the house without too much worry.

Crotaz currently spends two days per week in London doing consulting work. A one-way journey takes around three-and-a-half hours and he stays overnight in a business hotel, paid for by his employer.

Slightly to his surprise, Crotaz is quite enjoying the “enforced downtime” of the train ride – although he wouldn’t necessarily commit to doing it for the next 20 years, it works for now.

“What I have now is the freedom to say no to things, to choose the work that I want to do,” he says. “We both have the freedom to work less if we choose to, and maybe over time we will do that.”

Crotaz is also loving the chance to explore the Malverns, and is finding his new rural community more authentic and less status-obsessed than the world he left behind.

“Where we live now is a beautiful part of the world,” he says. “The air is clearer, you can see the stars at night. There is a massive health and stress benefit. We have sacrificed convenience which is making us better at planning, because you do have to plan ahead more, but that is not a bad thing. And I know I am lucky to live here.”