CHARLOTTE BRADMAN swapped a house in landlocked Yorkshire for coastal campervan life, and never looked back
It’s a rough old day out there. A biting wind and sharp showers blow relentlessly over Newquay’s Fistral Beach, hail swirling as if in a washing machine. But Charlotte Bradman is nice and cosy inside her silver Citroen Relay campervan, her hands around a steaming mug of rooibos tea.
It’s a neat little space, everything tucked deftly away in baskets slotted into nooks and crannies, above and below. Here and there are personal touches: a pinboard studded with mementoes, and everywhere, splashes of Charlotte’s favourite colour: turquoise, the hue of the ocean on a sunnier day than this.
This minimalist lifestyle was forced upon her when she lost her home after a default on a mortgage payment. “I had to get rid of three bedrooms worth of random stuff I’d collected over the years, all things I had an emotional attachment to but which suddenly had no meaning,” she recalls. “I didn’t need them to thrive or survive – in fact, they were a noose around my neck. Getting rid of it all was so liberating.”
Faced with a radical change in circumstances, Charlotte, 40, chose to face it down. “I realised I didn’t want to engage with society’s rules and expectations,” she explains. “You have to live in a house. Work full-time. Tick all the boxes. Only then are you deemed a successful and valuable human being. I couldn’t cope with that anymore and so I opted out. That’s when I thought: why not just switch to the campervan permanently?”
