Bob Veitch and his wife Susan can see their old house from the garden of their new home in the small town of Marshfield in Gloucestershire. “We get no pangs of regret,” says Bob, even though they lived in their Edwardian farmhouse for 40 years and raised their two sons and cared for his parents there. They were, he says, “the happiest years of our lives”. The farmhouse, which was outside the village, had four bedrooms, two acres of land and two large outbuildings and, when his parents moved in, they added two more bedrooms. But by the 90s, when their sons had left home and Bob’s parents had died, they started to think about moving somewhere smaller.