This week I moved from Wrexham to Wallasey, on the Wirral, just across the Mersey estuary from Liverpool. It's not a technical post, but it's a real update. My location is on this site and on my CV, so it felt worth a proper explanation, not just a silent edit to a field.
Why leave Wrexham
Wrexham is where I did my MSc in Cybersecurity, finished this year with a Distinction and an 88% dissertation mark. It was the right place for that: a good university, a manageable cost of living, and enough quiet to actually write 15,000 words of testbed methodology without much else pulling at my attention. My contract there ran out around the same time, and renewing it felt like the wrong default. Wrexham was really only ever tied to the course, so signing on for another year there didn't make much sense. Moving somewhere with a bigger security job market within reach did.
Why Wallasey
Wallasey sits on the Wirral peninsula, on the opposite bank of the Mersey to Liverpool. It's a short ferry or train ride into Liverpool city centre, so Liverpool's job market is properly on my doorstep now, not a long drive away. Liverpool has a real cluster of financial services, logistics, and managed security providers, and being able to get to interviews or an office there without a multi-hour round trip matters practically, even if most of my work so far has been remote.
It also widens my commuting range without pinning me to one city. Chester, Manchester, and the wider North West all become realistic in a way they weren't from Wrexham, which was well placed for North Wales but a longer haul in most other directions.
What actually changes
For the job search, the honest answer is: less than you'd think, and more than nothing.
Less, because I'm still open to remote and hybrid roles, and that hasn't changed at all. Most of my current work managing Sophos and Fortinet firewall estates across multiple client networks is already done remotely, and I'd expect any new role in that space to offer at least a hybrid pattern. The move doesn't signal a shift away from that.
More, because it removes a filter that recruiters and hiring managers apply without necessarily telling you: distance from the office. A role that specifies "hybrid, one or two days a week in Liverpool" was a harder sell from Wrexham than it is from Wallasey. Being able to say yes to that without a two-hour commute each way opens up postings I'd otherwise have had to pass on or negotiate around.
What stays the same
The work itself hasn't moved. I'm still doing the same firewall estate management, still writing up detection engineering and WAF research on this blog, and still looking for a role that lets me do that security work properly, not as a side effect of general IT support. The MSc, the dissertation, the Sentinel detection lab, none of that changes because my postcode did.
If anything, this is a small, practical adjustment, not a big turning point: closer to a bigger job market, still flexible on remote and hybrid, still doing the same work. I'll keep posting the technical write-ups here as usual. If you're hiring for network or detection engineering roles in or around Merseyside, or remotely, feel free to get in touch through the contact form.