We all dream of living abroad – but which cities do people actually go to?

There’s a lot of highly-rated cities for people to live and work from, but why don’t more people go there, asks Hamish McRae

Vienna is on the top of the list (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

We have all done it. That moment on holiday when we wonder what it would be like to live there all the time instead of just breaking the routine for a couple of weeks.

The seductive idea of starting a new life made a fortune for Peter Mayle, the London advertising executive who moved to France and wrote A Year in Provence about his experiences there. That was more than 30 years ago and the book not only sold 6 million copies, but led to a whole raft of similar stories of people who had moved aboard, given up one life and started another.

Of course not everyone could do something like that. The awkward reality of having to earn a living intrudes. But since then, and particularly since the pandemic, what was an impossible dream has, for a significant minority, become a realistic possibility. For anyone who can work from home, that home does not need to be in Britain or wherever the job is located. Home can in theory at least be anywhere. Of course this is only for people that can do most of their work online and at the right stage of their careers. But for the minority that can manage it, the choice of location is much wider than even five years ago, let alone 30.