Gift guides
Housewarming gifts for the friend leaving London.
Eight gifts for the friend who’s just swapped a postcode for a parish. The shift is bigger than people warn you about — here’s what helps.
Most of my friends who left London did it in their mid-thirties, with a baby on the way or a baby already arrived, and the move was always sold to me as a sensible upgrade. More square footage. A garden. A spare room. The maths checked out on every spreadsheet I was shown. What none of those spreadsheets mentioned was the first three months, when the new house is too quiet, the nearest decent coffee is a fifteen-minute drive, and the friend who used to text you about a Tuesday-night drink at the Eagle is now a postcode you don’t recognise.
The good housewarming gift for someone leaving London is not, in my experience, a celebration of the new place. It is something that helps with the gap. The gap between the convenience they had and the convenience they don’t. The gap between the friends they knew and the strangers in the parish hall. The gap between the city evening, which they could compose from a hundred options, and the village evening, which they have to make from what they have in the kitchen.
The eight below all aim at that gap. Most are under £75. None of them are a candle.
1. The first dinner, delivered.
The honest first need on moving day is dinner. The kitchen is in boxes, the kettle is somewhere, the nearest takeaway is no longer a six-minute walk. The best gift you can send the morning of the move is a voucher for whatever does deliver to the new house — Deliveroo and Uber Eats both do gift cards at any value, and most rural villages now have at least one place on one of them. Send it with a one-line text the morning they’re packing the van: this is your dinner tonight; you are not cooking. It is the gift they will remember as the kindest thing anyone did that week.
2. A walking book routed from their front door.
This is the one I make and sell, so apply the bias warning. But the reason I started doing it — properly — was watching three different friends move out of London in the same year, and watching all three of them pull up Google Maps on a Saturday morning to ask the same question. What’s actually around here? The mapping apps are useless at it. They’ll show you a footpath but not whether the footpath is a real walk or a six-foot sliver of mud between two A-roads. They’ll show you a pub but not whether the pub is the kind of pub you drink in or the kind of pub that sells microwaved lasagne to the M40 traffic.
The book draws ten walks fresh from one address — their address — with a route line, a written commentary, a length, and a difficulty. It’s designed for exactly the moment they’re in: brand new to the area, want to start finding it on foot, don’t want to start with the obvious tourist trail. Try it on their postcode — the demo is free and you see the cover and the first walk before paying.
3. A fortnightly delivery from a London thing they’ll miss.
Three months of the loaf they used to get from Gail’s, or the coffee from Monmouth, or the bottles from The Good Wine Shop, posted to the new address. The point is not that they can’t get bread or coffee or wine in the country — they can — but that the specific Saturday-morning thing they had has not gone away. Pump Street in Suffolk does a six-month chocolate-and-bread subscription that lands at around £90; Monmouth’s three-month coffee subscription is closer to £45. The trick is to time it: the first delivery should arrive in week two, after the unpacking, when the missing-London ache hits.
4. A really good throw for the sofa.
The first thing they will buy in the new house, if they haven’t already, is a sofa. The first thing they will not buy, because nobody buys it for themselves, is the throw that goes on the sofa. Melin Tregwynt in Pembrokeshire weaves heavy geometric throws around the £120 mark; Tweedmill in Denbighshire is a notch cheaper at £60–£90 with the same UK-mill provenance. Both improve with a winter of use; both are, after a year, the thing the dog sleeps on. The country house is colder than the London flat — it just is — and the throw turns the new sofa into a place to spend a Sunday afternoon.
5. A National Trust membership.
This is the gift I’d skip in London and buy first thing for someone who’s just left. The London move tends to put you within twenty minutes’ drive of three or four properties; the membership pays for itself in a single Saturday in November, and the car parks alone justify it. Buy it as a gift here. Pair it with the Trust’s little hardback handbook so they have something to leaf through with their coffee on Sunday morning, deciding where to go.
6. A doormat with the new surname on it.
The half-naff one that turns out to be loved. Coir takes ten years of weather, and there is a small daily moment in seeing your own surname underfoot when you arrive home that is genuinely good after a move. Eat My Mat and Coir Mats UK both do custom-stencilled mats around £30. The rule, as ever: surname only. The Hendersons works; Live Laugh Love doesn’t.
7. A pair of decent waterproof boots.
The single thing nobody owns when they leave London and everyone needs by week three. The London life lets you get away with a pair of trainers and a sensible coat; the village life means a wet field, a footpath, a dog, and a shed where boots live. Muck Boot sells the boot most country people I know actually wear (the Wetland or the Originals Tall, both around £95). Dubarry are the upmarket version at £380 if the budget is enormous and the recipient is going to be photographed at a horse trial. For walking-as-walking, the Muck Boot is what gets used. Get the size right; ask first.
8. A subscription to the local paper.
The smallest gift on this list and one of the more useful. Most counties still have a print weekly — the Oxford Times, the Yorkshire Post, the Western Morning News — and a year’s subscription is in the £50 range. It tells them about the village fete, the planning application, the school, the pub that’s changed hands. It is the single fastest way to feel like you live somewhere rather than just sleep there. Most papers will sell a gift subscription if you ring the office; The Paperboy indexes most of them.
What not to send.
A welcome-to-the-countryside hamper of jam, chutney, and shortbread is, for some reason, the default gift sent to friends who leave London, and I have never seen one of these hampers actually opened. They sit on the kitchen counter, gathering dust, until they get put on a shelf, where they continue to gather dust, and the shortbread is finally thrown out at Christmas. Don’t send the hamper.
Don’t send a gardening book either, unless you know they actually garden. Don’t send a wellies-and-waxed-jacket parody (a stuffed Labrador, a print of a fox in a tweed cap). It reads as if you’re slightly making fun of them for the move, which they are sensitive about even if they pretend not to be.
Do send food they can eat in the first week, a thing that fills the sofa, a thing that puts them on the right footpath, and a thing that connects them to the place they’ve arrived in. The list above is structured roughly in that order. The first dinner and the walking book are the two I’d send if I could only send two.
A note on the second gift on this list
The walking book is the one I make.
If you’d like to see what the book would look like for the friend you’re buying for, type their new postcode into the demo on the homepage. It draws ten walks fresh from their address, in about a minute, and you see the cover and the first walk before you decide. £39, posted within seven working days, with a full refund if the address can’t support three real walks.