'I turned my back on conventional living and have found freedom and happiness with home in my campervan'

For the last six years, Charlotte has lived a nomadic lifestyle in her dearly beloved campervan. Her current location is Cornwall, where there’s plenty of laybys boasting sea views and the opportunity to work for a company offering coastal saunas and wellness experiences. But for much of the winter, she was back in her home region of Yorkshire, adventuring around the Dales, much closer to where she grew up in a village near to Haworth.

"What I’ve found is that not being anchored to a particular place liberates your mind,” the 42-year-old says. “You suddenly have more scope and capacity to connect with the people and environment around you, even with yourself, and that does come with having less things as well. Moving from a house into a van, you literally just have the clothes you wear and a couple of books. It’s a huge transition but I think having less things creates more headspace. You’re not surrounded by clutter and stuff.

"(This lifestyle) has given me more time because I don’t have to work as much because I don’t have loads of bills to pay. With more time and less financial pressure comes less stress, less worry, less anxiety, and with that you are liberated in so many different ways. I have more time, energy and head space to be more creative, to live, to thrive, to find what it is I’m passionate about.”

Charlotte's journey to contentment is documented in her book The Happy Nomad, released in paperback today. It’s described as both a memoir and a manifesto, questioning the status quo of the world we live in and looking in-depth at our relationship with material things. It was difficult to write – Charlotte discusses experiences of domestic violence, attempted suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental health challenges, as well as the struggle of living with a crippling mortgage and mounting bills. But she “broke free” – from the house, her troubled past and the nine-to-five treadmill - to find a simpler way of life, and she wanted to share her journey.

Writing it began in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which Charlotte had worked as part of a team of community nurses in Shipley. That was in the days when people would stand on their doorsteps and clap for the NHS, showing their appreciation for health workers. Afterwards, living in her campervan in Newquay, she found she’d often be ‘beeped’ at by people in passing vehicles, aiming to cause distress or expressing their displeasure at her being there. "Suddenly, instead of being clapped, I was being beeped,” she recalls. “I wanted to let people know that I was a human being, that I was exactly the same as they were, so I wrote this article in the local press, just to let people know I’m no different to them, trying to get by in life, trying to survive and thrive.”

After the article was published, she was contacted by a literary agent interested in her story. “Everything in the book, I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, really because I have a lot of trauma I wanted to process,” she says. “One of the best way to reflect on your experiences and to process difficult emotions and challenges you’ve been through is to bring it out of yourself and put it down on the page...(The book) is really authentic and I don’t hold anything back. It’s real.”

Charlotte bought her first home at the age of 20, in the grips of mental illness and substance abuse. Her second was a purchase with a then-partner several years later, but when they split, she found herself struggling to pay the mortgage and renting out all of the rooms to cover the costs as best she could. The house, eventually, was repossessed and for a time, Charlotte then lived in a caravan in the Lake District with a new partner. When that relationship broke down, she found another way to live – in her trusty campervan. “I wanted to run away,” she admits. “I couldn’t deal with life anymore and I just ran – and it was the best thing I ever did.”

In her mid 20s, after a suicide attempt, Charlotte sought mental health support and then felt “empowered” to turn her back on the drink and drugs. After a turbulent child and young adulthood, she has found solace in mindfulness and nature – and frequently immerses herself in freezing cold water. That has always been an escapism, even as a kid. “That’s where I find my peace, in the water. When you throw yourself into cold water in a river in the Yorkshire Dales, you don’t have time to think, because it’s all about sensation. Your body just wakes up. All of the fear, the anxiety, the uncertainty, it all leaves you...I still am addicted to that, that instant shock of cold water that brings you straight into the present moment.”

Charlotte describes herself as being proof that it’s possible to be happy living with very little in a small box with wheels. She hopes that people take away an important message from her book. “Don’t measure your worth or value as a human being with material possessions, measure it instead with moments, with happiness and with time,” she says. £It’s alright having all these things and working 40 hours a week but if you don’t have time to thrive, to be creative, to connect with other human beings, to be out in nature, then you’re not really living. It’s about owning the moment, not the things.”

- The Happy Nomad by Charlotte Bradman is out in paperback today, priced £10.99 (Yellow Kite).