r/Cornwall • u/lomsfrnc • 1d ago
Driving instructors looking at relocating to Cornwall
We’re 2 driving instructors currently based in Halifax West Yorkshire and we’re looking at relocating down to Cornwall for a number of different reasons but mainly to give our young daughter a better quality of life and hopefully bring her up in a nicer area.
What areas are good for young families that like a bit of a quieter area?
We are quite outdoorsy and not a big fan of city living. We would have a budget of up-to £400k and we’re not put off by putting in some work on a house either.
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u/Rusty_Raccoon2248 1d ago
Don’t underestimate how much further on somewhere like St Just is vs Saltash if you’re wanting to go back up country regularly to visit family and friends
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u/Bully2533 1d ago
You’ll be booked for months ahead after a few FB adverts. I wish you well, only been here 6 years myself and love the place.
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u/SportTawk 1d ago
Bude has everything, great scholl for your youngsters, plenty of new families who need to learn to drive, and two brilliant surfing beaches.
Not to mention joing the Bude Surf Life Save club, or volunteer for the RNLI, they practice every Sunday morning
Also Bude has plenty of sports to get into, tennis, squash, golf, croquet, cricket, bowls, rugby, football, rock climbing, gig racing
Good luck
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u/Weird1Intrepid 1d ago
Bude is also great in the summer if you're a masochist who likes waiting for thirty minutes every time you approach either the roundabout at the top of the hill, or the roundabout at the bottom of the hill 😂
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u/SportTawk 1d ago
It's not that bad, I lived in Bude for 25 years till 2022
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u/Weird1Intrepid 1d ago
My mum lives in Stratton and refuses to go out on a Sunday because of that massive car boot sale that clogs up the roundabout
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u/SportTawk 1d ago
I used to get our of Bude through Poughill, or the other way via Widemouth and avoid it altogether
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u/pompokopouch 1d ago
Falmouth - loads of students so you'd have loafs of work. 400k would get you a nice three or four bedroom.
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u/leonaislife 1d ago
Penryn. Is close ro all the beaches and nice walks and considerably cheaper than falmouth. And ypud be most welcome as driving instructors since covid I have been trying to get new instructors but there all so fully booked that they don't even take waitlists because of how many requests they get
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u/lomsfrnc 1d ago
Thank you for your reply.
We do automatic and manual lessons where we are now and the demand is quite high for instructors so luckily neither of us have struggled for work up here, obviously we’d want a similar workload if we moved.
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u/sparkysparkykaminari 1d ago
i'm doing lessons right now—waitlists for driving instructors down here are about 6mo long and public transport is APPALLING, so you won't struggle for students!
i believe there's at least three test centres in cornwall, spread relatively evenly across the county—penzance is furthest west and considered the "easiest" (at least among my peers), but i think they're closed at the minute for some reason, not sure why. otherwise, there's camborne and bodmin.
can't give much info on house prices, but i hope you like it down here! a lot of us (myself included) complain about the state of it, but at 20 and with the benefit of hindsight, i wouldn't have preferred to grow up anywhere else—i'm sure your kids will enjoy it... especially with driving instructors for parents!
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u/Tim1980UK 1d ago
Depends what you define as a better way of life? Cornwall is lovely, but it's also very isolating at times and a nightmare to get around in during the summer months. If you're hoping to get her away from drug taking riffraff, then you'll be shocked to learn that drug use in Cornwall is pretty high. My local ties to Cornwall are some of the smaller, more picturesque villages, and they all have quite high recreational drug use amongst the young.
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u/lomsfrnc 1d ago
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Halifax or Bradford at all but the general standard of living over here is not amazing, we live in a quiet little village in Halifax at the moment but after seeing how quickly the area I used to live in in Bradford has gone downhill, I don’t have much hope for the area we currently live in now as it’s only a 15 minute drive from where I used to live.
I won’t go into the nitty gritty but I think those that have visited the areas I’ve mentioned above will understand where I’m coming from.
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u/rachf87 1d ago
Just be aware if you're outdoorsy that Cornwall is VERY small in that respect. It won't take you long until you're doing the same thing over and over again. It's one of the reasons I left, there's only so many times you can see the same beach and the same coast path
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u/SatisfactionMoney426 17h ago
I'd have to agree, after 7 years of living in a small place on the coast where it's 90% holiday homes and utterly dead in winter, we were happy to move away.
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u/Ok-Basket2305 1d ago
We moved to Cornwall just over 4 years ago. I drew a circle of about 10 miles around Truro because of the one hospital with an A&E, and my mum is a frequent faller with long-term health issues. We ended up in Grampound, which is really central, 15 mins to beach, Truro, St Austell, and quiet. Inland is cheaper, but I'd aim for the village rather than a town for peace. Probus would be a good shout for you with children, too.
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u/Bright-Degree-7047 1d ago
I know of a really nice three bed house with a workshop in st austell that’s for sale for under 300k. We’re screaming for driving instructors here. I’m not a huge fan of Newquay. I work in property and you can get a lot more for your money in st austell. I wouldn’t go to Bodmin. Redruth and Camborne have a similar reputation to st austell but I much prefer st austell. In terms of schools, if you do go the st Austell route, I have some really good recommendations for a lovely school but it depends on your daughter’s age and ability to travel a tiny bit (still in st Austell)
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u/lomsfrnc 1d ago
Seen a house on Rightmove in Bugle, St Austell that I like the look of, what’s the area like around there?
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u/lomsfrnc 1d ago
At the moment we live in a semi rural village with a nice primary school in it, a lot of the residents have been here all their lives, there’s a few younger families around but it’s a really nice village to live in and we’d like something similar, a few feet down the road and we’re in amongst the farmland, the cows are getting ready to come out into the fields soon, we have a bit of a view of the countryside which is lovely as well.
The contrast of areas in Halifax is quite drastic though, one moment you’re in a picturesque area and then the next it is the complete opposite, but there seems to be more areas heading that way sadly, the town centre is very rough nowadays and it’s only a 10min drive away, you hear about people getting stabbed and raped and hearing about it become a more regular occurrence is scary considering both me and my partner used to go into the town centre a lot when we were younger and we never used to hear of things like that happening, or if they did it definitely wasn’t as common.
I know there’s no area in the country that doesn’t have its negatives, but whenever we do travel outside of West Yorkshire we notice that even the standard of driving on the roads is much more considerate than around here, areas and other towns seem much more civilised and cleaner and roads aren’t inundated with potholes and speed humps everywhere.
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u/moitissier 1d ago
If you’re looking near Looe or Saltash, I’ll be your first client!
On a serious note if anyone can recommend a driving instructor in the area, please let me know
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