The hero of this story didn’t set himself the goal of reaching England. Before moving here, he had never previously visited the UK. Rather than choosing the country, he came here to pursue his dream of working for Bentley.
In 2023, Ilya Razumov, 39, now a car exterior designer at Bentley, came to the Cheshire town of Crewe from Moscow on a work visa:
I didn't plan to move, but it mattered to me to stay within my field. Bentley had always been my favourite car brand and I just had to be part of that legend. So in May last year, when I received an offer to work for the company, I agreed immediately. The same day, I started to prepare my documents for a Skilled Worker visa. It took me five months to get all the documents and move here. When I arrived, I only had £900 with me. This was just enough to rent a flat in Crewe and make it to my first paycheck. For now, I'm living alone. My wife and children have stayed behind in Moscow (my daughter is 12 and my son is seven). I plan to bring them here next year. We talk regularly. This year, we went on holiday together to Thailand and I spent the winter holidays with them in Moscow.
I am a qualified automobile designer responsible for car exteriors. I adore my profession. It is my third qualification and I chose it carefully. I spent a long time finding myself. After school, I went to an art college and studied painting but it wasn't really my thing; my parents had strongly influenced my choice. After that, I studied interior design at the Natalia Nesterova Academy in Moscow. This profession also didn't end up being my true calling, so I went to Moscow Polytechnical University, from where I graduated in 2019, after which I began a master’s degree. Throughout my studies, I did placements at several automobile manufacturers, all of which are parts of the Volkswagen Group; Audi and Volkswagen in Germany and Porsche in Austria. Then, I started looking for work, so I sent out my portfolio and received offers from four companies; Changan in Italy, Mitsubishi in Japan and Lotus and Bentley, both in the UK. I chose the last of these, firstly because I had always dreamed of working for Bently and secondly because they were part of the Volkswagen Group, and I had done all my previous work placements at Volkswagen companies. Furthermore, it so happened that during my 2022 work placement at Audi, I had worked in the same team as a senior designer who subsequently became chief car exterior designer at Bentley. And when I sent him my portfolio three years later, he remembered me and decided to take me on. It turns out he had followed how my placement had gone at Audi, which was nice to hear. Bentley has signed a long-term contract with me, so it's here where I plan to grow and build my career.
I didn't make a concerted effort to learn the language. Everything happened quite naturally. I went to a nursery school with a special focus on English and then I went to a school where we studied the language at an advanced level. Maybe it's because I started to learn it so early on that English came easily to me. I added to my vocabulary by listening to songs and watching films in the original. By the age of 14, I already spoke the language fairly well.
I live in the town of Crewe, where they once made Rolls-Royce cars. Since 2003, it's been the HQ and design and production centre of Bentley Motors Limited. It takes me 12 minutes to walk to the office from my home. Crewe is 40 minutes from Manchester and two hours from London, which is where I go to take walks and develop myself culturally. The last time I went to the capital was to meet Artemy Lebedev [a Russian designer and blogger], who I hadn't previously known personally, although I had seen him walking around Moscow. His format is ‘10,000 Steps of Talk’, when he invites strangers who he finds interesting to walk and talk with him. When I saw on Instagram that Lebedev was in England, I wrote to him, introduced myself and suggested we met. We talked about art design and it felt like we had known each other all our lives.
Before moving here, I’d never visited England, but things here are mostly as I imagined. The only unpleasant surprise was how the NHS works. I want to register with a doctor and I submitted the form at the start of May, but I’m still waiting. Maybe there's another minus: the price of groceries is high compared to Germany and Austria and wine here is three times more expensive than in the rest of Europe.
