Tabitha Webb doesn’t much like forward planning. An approach that has seen her successfully create multiple business models over the last 20 years; and a practice she wasn’t about to change when renovating the house she bought four years ago in the small village of Martyr Worthy in Hampshire.
When nine months pregnant with her second daughter, Primrose, Tabitha relocated from Wandsworth in London to the countryside with husband Gavin and daughter, Betsey, who was six at the time.
The couple had no affiliation with the area, aside from her mother living in nearby Winchester (she has since moved), but it was commutable to London for Gavin, who works there as a geologist.
“It needed to be somewhere within an hour on the train. So we, probably like most people, drew a circle around the city. Also, we love Cornwall, so we thought, OK we can get down there fairly easily, too,” she says pragmatically, adding, “But, we’re by the river and it’s really pretty”.
When the couple married in the French Pyrenees in 2010, Gavin, who Tabitha describes as, “A very stable human being who’s probably completely exasperated by the way that I approach life”, had said if they had children he’d want to leave London.
