Dispatches & Dreams: Letters to Hyperreality /001
Ask Us Anything—our new Q&A series: This week’s letter comes from a couple from Oregon dreaming of life just beyond London, England
It's only been a few weeks since we launched Notes Between Us (which you received far more enthusiastically than we expected), and now we're starting something else: Dispatches & Dreams: Letters to Hyperreality. Every week, letters arrive from readers around the world—people writing about leaving one city for another, about work that might actually matter, about trying to live with more intention. Their questions sound familiar because they are ours too.
What we notice is this: everyone seems to be asking the same thing in different ways. How do you know when to stay and when to go? How do you choose between the life you have and the life you imagine? How do you make decisions when you're not even sure what you want?
We've decided to try something. In every instalment of this new series, we'll take one letter and work through it together—not to solve anything, necessarily, but to think it through properly. Sometimes it will be about travel, sometimes about work, sometimes about relationships. Usually all three.
This week, a couple from Portland writes about wanting to move to the UK—looking for a slower pace, more space, but still wanting access to London...
Q:
Hi there,
We’re a couple from Portland, Oregon, and we’ve been dreaming about relocating to the UK for the past few years. We absolutely love London (its energy, culture, museums, and of course, the food) but we’re also looking for somewhere a little calmer to actually live.Ideally, we’d love a town or village with good rail links into London (we’d still want to go in often), access to an international airport, and a strong sense of place—somewhere charming, walkable, with a nice café or two and perhaps a good bookshop. We're both remote workers in design and publishing, so internet and lifestyle matter more to us than big job markets.
Could you suggest a few places that strike the right balance: close enough to London for regular visits, but not in the thick of it?
Warmly,
Mark & Dana