Sharing a Van With My Partner For a Year Was Both Incredible And Awful

What I needed to survive in my year as a vanomad

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From November 2017 to November 2018, I lived in a converted Luton van with my partner, Thor, travelling around the British Isles. Reactions from friends and acquaintances when I announced my change of lifestyle varied from “Oh, no, that’s awful!” to “Wow, how amazing, you’ll be so free.”

Through a long, snowy, adventurous winter, a hopeful spring, a summer of fun festivals and into late autumn as I faced the prospect of another winter as a nomad, I discovered that vanlife is both an unforgettably life-enhancing experience and an unending series of challenges.

Here’s what I’ve found to be the requirements for living in a van full-time in the UK and, in particular, sharing it with another.

Be prepared to keep moving

Parking up to visit sacred sites such as burial mounds and stone circles meant that we had to be prepared to be moved on at any time by local council officials, the Forestry Commission, National Trust, or the English Heritage. This could happen at 9 am — so we needed to be constantly ready to put everything into “move mode” and go. We were lucky: in a year, we only had a couple of knocks on the door.