Please help!!!

1POSTS

7 years ago

Hi,

how is it in Chestnut and/or Hertford socially-wise?

We are an expatriate couple from Europe with 3 kids (11, 7 and 5), we've been living in the middle of Essex for the last four years and we've found it very difficult here to make friends with the locals or have any kind of social life. People here tend to stick to their group and seem not interested at all in meeting or knowing foreigners. Even our kids find it difficult to have any real friends, they rarely if ever get invited to birthday parties for instance, even though we've had kids from their classes for a sleepover several times. The friends they are able to make and who seem like real friends for a while seem to shun them after a while for no discernible reason, which we find utterly puzzling coming from kids less than 12. Other foreigners in our area have reported similar experiences, like long-planned invitations to a party being cancelled the day before without as much as a word of explanation, kids being left to play completely on their own for months on end at school, etc.

Because of this situation we're now planning to move to a different area. We need to be at commuting distance from London, ideally Liverpool St station, for work, and obviously we're looking for a nice, safe place for the kids with good schools and amenities. Would Cheshunt be a nice place for foreigners to live in your opinion, i.e., from a social live / friendship / community feel perspective, would the kids feel at ease there, be able to have friends, etc?

All advice and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

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Cynic UK/Netherlands Expert

8103POSTS

7 years ago

Hi and welcome to the Forum.

Our experiences as an Expat Family have been the opposite to yours - we came here over 20 years ago with 3 young kids, 2 of which didn't speak English. The local schools couldn't have been more accommodating, the 2 youngest had a tutor supplied by the state to help them learn English. All 3 thrived here; although 1 moved back to Holland once she had finished Uni etc.

The significant difference I guess was that we moved to Yorkshire; we could have lived anywhere in the UK with my job (I was brought up in London and nothing would have persuaded me to move back there), but we chose the North as we had never lived up here before. My wife is a practice nurse in the local doctors, so everyone knows her and our kids took part in local sporting events in their younger years.

Cheshunt isn't far from where I grew up, my only comment would be it's expensive there. My advice, wherever you chose to live, is to get involved in local events, try and work locally, encourage your kids to join local sporting clubs.

That said, there's nothing that would persuade us to stay here; we came here for my job, now we're nearing retirement, we will go back to Holland; as they say there it's "gezellig" back there, something we never experienced here. It will be hard for us to leave as 2 of our kids have become Yorkshiremen and have met local partners, they won't leave.

Hope this helps.

Cynic
Expat Team