Retirees bombarding our beautiful rural seaside area

indeed Day 6
Anybody got any idea why retired people moving into an area should ”affect schools”, by the way ? (As OP seems to think)

This naughty old Gran has to keep her joints working.

Hmmm. A bit of padding to authenticate a realistic ID?

Forgive my cynicism. A 'Gran' despising other Grandparents who dare move into her area?

Still, hope you got the responses you were looking for.

Scotland has a freedom to roam law. But there are exceptions to this freedom:

www.scotways.com/faq/law-on-statutory-access-rights/230-where-do-access-rights-not-apply

Signs may be necessary in certain places. And they’ll probably be written in English.

So it is easy to see how one sign could be misused by someone to further justify their hatred of the English.

Easy but reprehensible.

If travel broadens the mind surely meeting people who come from other places does the same?

Gaggi I know its not the whole solution but many housing associations give priority to key workers and they come top of the list when a property is available for shared ownership.

Callistemon, Dh's great-great-grandfather was Scottish. He left as a young man and never went back but maybe that means we're not beyond the pale after all in Scotland!

I'll join you in the Lake District, I love it there. I must go to Beatrix Potter's house, though - it's a compulsory trip for us every time we stay in the Lakes.

Danni sorry if I upset you because I didn't phrase it as well as I might. It was a personal comment to the poster who had been so unkind about my friend. It was a question not a statement and, having worked in London, I know some are lovely and some not so lovely.

Janipat Did you actually read my post? I didn't say it was typical of Londoners, I asked if it was and you have not answered my question? I really hope your judgemental attitude is not typical of them.

Yes, he has lived in London all his life but not in the same place so not the same neighbours. I didn't blame anyone, you made that assumption of blame but then you were judgemental so it must be something you feel a need to do. I know this person so I know what he is like and you are so wrong! He is very smiley and friendly and I'm absolutely sure he not only smiles at people but is helpful and friendly. However, he is not one of those insular Londoners who think the civilised world stops at the M25. Yes, I've worked in London and know what I'm talking about. I worked with a lot of Europeans, some who had lived in other parts of the UK and they experienced the same insularity from some Londoners. I said 'some' so please take note and I would ask you not to twist what I have said.

We, who are not wealthy but are educated and well-meaning, moved here from a city four years ago when both still working, and have done our best to get involved in the church and community without 'telling anyone how to run things'. Maybe it helps that my husband's mother was from the area and we have lots of family here, so we aren't total 'incomers'.

Our 'village' is having a development of 900-odd houses stuck on the edge of it, as usual with inadequate provision of infrastructure such as roads to the station, bus services, new health centre, post office, etc. These houses all cost £280,000 or above so I doubt that local young people will be able to afford them. There was meant to be a proportion of 'affordable homes' but this was cut because the costs of the road junction improvement grew too high, or so the developers say. I know the country needs new homes, but huge developments in rural areas with few jobs (so most will commute by car) doesn't seem the best solution. And it's ruining my country view (yes, I've become a NIMBY!).

notanan2 I understand everything you have said as this has happened to a lesser extent where we lived in 2 different places. It isn't that the villages didn't like most of the people that moved in just that they moved and brought their old way of life with them and didn't try to change. City living is totally different to countryside village life. For a start things evolve more slowly so although we don't mind change it happens at a very slow pace. Twice we have had to prove that we could fit in and we moved for one village to another, the last one only a few miles away and we already knew a few people that lived there! By doing things slowly and not taking over we have been welcomed and are now part of the village and are asked if we are going to the coffee mornings etc. I was asked to join the rota for the village charity shop as they knew I would take things slowly and learn how everything is run and not try and change things.

Like the Lake District. Locally bred families are priced out of local homes.

I was dismayed to hear my SIL born and bred in Liverpool and lived there for 60 years now relocated in a Dorset village call some new people to the village 'incomers'- some people have no insight! By the way is there any room left in Dorset everyone on Escape to the Country seems to go there?

I read an article but cant find the reference for you sadly that some people who relocate to the country find they cant adjust and go back to a town with amenities. We did just that from Wensleydale (where we were called bloody Londoners sometimes in our hearing from people who had relocated there from Stockton on Tees!!) to a small Leicestershire market town where we seem to be accepted although not included.

...clicked before I had finished! I agree with the comments from those who are so sanctimonious about their area, where they are all inter-related bla bla bla. People can live wherever they like - what a world we would live in if nobody moved around! Also, agree with the person who says; don't blame the buyers - it's the seller's choice who they sell to!

Me neither! Miseries

Where I live, every spare bit of green land is now covered in new housing ‘to ease the housing shortage’. However, many of the houses are larger than needed for local people and are being bought by people currently living in London who are renting out their London homes and moving here - we have excellent transport links to London. This is ‘flooding’ our overloaded schools, doctors, and hospitals (don’t mention the traffic jams!) and in no way easing the housing shortage.

CanadianGran and GreenGran78 thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience. Both responses are helpful when trying to understand rapidly changing communities .
Off to aqua aerobics now. This naughty old Gran has to keep her joints working. Perhaps Gransnet is keeping my mind working.

Hold on a moment - are you telling me your lovely neighbours are choosing to sell to outsiders and yet you're blaming the buyer?

Rapidly changing demographics in a community or neighbourhood is always a challenge for both local and regional governing.

For instance our neighbourhood went from overflowing with young families to the aging of those families to the point where our neighbourhood school closed for lack of enrollment.
My daughter lives in a suburb of Victoria BC that is growing so quickly the schools are overflowing and children going to classes in portable buildings. Downtown Victoria is so overpriced that there are most young people are moving further out to the suburbs, with a longer commute into the city to jobs. Downtown there are speculative buyers, short term rentals and out-of-country owners. That and quite a few over-50's that were lucky enough to live there before it got too crazy.

Our provincial government last year implemented a 'speculative and vacancy tax' on properties to try to force more of the empty downtown properties into long term rental market. This applies to Victoria, Vancouver and a few other areas where prices are so overinflated that it is causing changes to the local economy. All those rich people owning homes can't get a coffee at Starbucks because there are no employees that want to commute 2 hours for a minimum wage job.

It's not an easy issue to manage, and there is a worry for local governments to maintain a certain balance between established and newer residents.

The days when people lived in the same place for generations, rarely travelling more than a few miles away, came to a fairly abrupt halt during the Industrial Revolution. Further changes followed. The introduction of the welfare state in the last century provided those too old to work with more options than depending on their younger family members to support and, eventually, care for them. Further changes followed. Some of these changes were beneficial for some and less so for others.

There's no turning back the clock and, no doubt, future generations will look back to the first decades of the twenty-first century and think how easy it was for us not to have had whatever contemporary problems they will have in the future.

I'm sitting here with a smile on my face, daydreaming about what it must be like to freely roam the countryside, countrywide - Countless natural features here (US) are privately owned, from river banks to deep ravines, waterfalls and streams, beaches and bluffs and breathtaking views - Just across the road .. Where I'm not allowed to go .. Because it's fenced off -

Scotland must be awesome!

SueDonim DH has some Scottish ancestry, as well as Welsh and English - he's a bit of a mongrel really.
Perhaps he could leave me at a lovely hotel in the Lakes while he goes on the whisky ancestry trail

Callistemon, it depends on your ancestry. There are secret scanners at the junction of the M6/M74. If they detect any English blood in people travelling by, automatic NO TRESSPASSERS signs pop out of the verges and central reservations.

The signs aren't visible to anyone of non-English ancestry so no one will believe a word of what I write, except other English people. It's all a plot by the SNP, of course.

I grew up in Liverpool. 50+ years ago we moved to a small town 20 miles away. The houses were cheaper and the area was more rural, and many other Liverpudlians did the same. I admit that the influx changed the town. New housing estates began dotting what had been almost a village consisting mainly of terraced houses.
Many of the local people deeply resented, or actively hated, the 'incomers', and who could blame them? We completely changed the place where they lived. Some of the ex-city-dwellers considered the locals, with their Lancashire accents and dialect words, to be inferior, unsophisticated, even a bit stupid. We certainly had a big impact on the place, which hadn't changed a lot for many years.
I'm glad to say that we are all one community now, but it took a long time for some people, from both sides, to get used to each other. Sadly, we rarely hear the 'auld fowks' talking in dialect, which seemed like a foreign language to the Scousers. Like most places, modern communications have watered down local accents.

SueDonim I was beginning to worry that, if I decided to visit Scotland, I may find a No Trespassing sign on the M6, or, if I sneaked in, be deported as an undesirable.

I think I’ve already revealed to much?. I might get linched on the way to collected my pension ?. Yes, we still have a post office ?