Joan Bakewell urges older Britons to downsize homes to ease the housing crisis

Broadcaster and journalist Joan Bakewell has urged older Britons to consider downsizing to help ease the housing crisis. The Labour peer believes there’s a moral and practical argument against pensioners rattling around in large homes while tens of thousands of families struggle to find accommodation. She goes so far as to say it could be seen, at best, as “short-sighted” to be hanging on in the autumn of our lives.

Instead, older so-called “empty nesters” should downsize in their own interests and those of the wider community.

Sir is the latest prime minister to try to remedy our poor house-building record, promising 1.5 million new homes before the next general election.

While supportive, Baroness Bakewell, 91, a former government-appointed Voice of Older People, believes space could be freed up by more people moving, rather than remaining emotionally and physically attached to increasingly impractical spaces as they age. And she knows what she is talking about, having sold her four-storey Victorian home to relocate to a nearby bungalow in readiness for what she calls “deep old age”.

The journey is movingly recounted in her recent memoir, The Tick of Two Clocks, and she will talk about it later this month as part of a stellar line-up at the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival. Her thoughts on ageing and the role of older people in a society that often ignores them, of which more shortly, deserve to be heard – by all generations.

“You may become widowed or divorced, as in my case, and it’s not particularly comfortable, nor especially congenial, to be an old person in a big house,” Bakewell explains. “For me, there came a time when it was right to go, because I was in this large home on my own, and that’s not a good place to grow old. It had a huge staircase all the way up and I was beginning to feel it just didn’t suit me any more.

“There’s much to be said for downsizing into somewhere you feel you can occupy entirely. Now I’ve just got one big room, a bedroom and a bathroom, and that’s me. There’s a tiny little bedroom upstairs which accommodates my children when they visit. But that’s all. I don’t want or need any more than that.”

While the broadcaster and author concedes the London house price boom put her in a privileged position – part of a generation that “accidentally got rich”, as she memorably puts it – allowing her the luxury of selling up and using the profits to move to a comfortable new pad with plenty of help, she believes everyone entering their 50s should be planning for their later years, no matter what their circumstances. A dramatic boom in our post-retirement life expectancy has not been accompanied by better planning for our comfort and care in extreme old age and the ravages of potential illness.

“I was part of that generation where we paid a few thousand pounds for a house, which we sold for £3million,” she admits. “That has enabled everything. We were the postwar generation of graduates who gathered a bit of money and put it down on a rickety old house, did it up and then were able to sell it later for much more. We enjoyed a property boom that benefited us enormously. That’s not so easy now.”

As Bakewell writes in The Tick of Two Clocks: “I am well aware how grossly unfair this is as property values boomed and our bricks and mortar turned to gold, I began to think there should be a tax raised on property that has soared in value.”

This could be used to help improve social housing and assist the homeless, she suggests, before ruefully conceding: “It’s not a popular idea: it lacks what they call political traction and would be a quick way to lose an election.”

Bakewell, who became the ‘s inaugural arts correspondent in the early Sixties, later having a lengthy affair with the playwright Harold Pinter, immortalised in his work, Betrayal, moved into her home in Primrose Hill in 1963 with her first husband, Michael. The young couple worked in TV but the ramshackle Victorian house provided a family home. When she sold up 53 years later, a major British star she declines to name was among potential buyers.

Today, having moved just before the pandemic, Bakewell is living comfortably in a studio once owned by the celebrated illustrator and artist Arthur Rackham, whose commissions included drawings for J M Barrie and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Neighbours include the author Andrew O’Hagan, who first introduced her to the community.

“It’s overlooking a little courtyard,” she explains. “We all know each other, we take in each other’s parcels and, occasionally, we have a glass of champagne.”

Her small paved garden has raised beds to allow for easy access, there’s no bath – she decided to do without for fear of getting stuck as she ages – and it’s planned to make life as easy as possible to allow independent living as long as possible. But if it sounds like an idyll, downsizing after more than half a century in a single property, and being forced to decide what to take and what to leave was far from easy. Though with her resources, Bakewell was able to hire a seeming battalion of helpers.

She remains stoic in her account – even when her car is broken into outside her new home on the day of the move – until her grandmother’s soup tureen is smashed, writing: “The head honcho of the removal team comes to explain there has been an accident. He shows me the lid of the tureen from my grandmother’s cherished dinner service. It is in fragments. Something I hardly use and rarely see but has been with me for decades suddenly matters.” Frozen into immobility, she sits and quivers.

Today Bakewell, who grew up in Hazel Grove, Cheshire, before going to Cambridge, is sanguine about the incident.

When I ask if she managed to hang on to any of the crockery her mother, an amateur potter, made, she chuckles: “I look up at the shelves now and I can spot four of them from where I’m sitting.” Such items, though economically valueless, remain enormously important, she explains: “I’ve said to my grandchildren, ‘These are not something you just put in the sale when I’m dead. You really must just pass them on.’ Because underneath the pottery are her initials and the date.

“You might not care, but somebody somewhere along the line will think, ‘That was made by my great-great-great-grandmother.’ And that would be precious to them.”

She adds: “The continuum of generations is an enormously valuable part of our awareness of our place between life and death.

‘There’s danger expecting to go into once they I don’t in “It’s good to know you have a relationship between those who are much older and generations coming after. It places you on the ladder of living.”

What’s her advice for anyone considering downsizing, I wonder?

“First of all, you need to think ahead a little bit as you get into middle age. You need to reckon what resources you will have,” she says. “Talk to people of your generation about what plans they’re making. Some people want to go into old people’s homes or to care homes where they can have a small room, or sometimes almshouses, for example. I’m very much in favour of little nests of establishments often round a courtyard.” A care home or a retirement village, she insists, is not for her.

“I wanted to live in a community that has young people and old people,” she says.

“I like to hear young children playing in the school down the road. I like the idea that the local shops have got foreign food and things like that. I like the nature of an innercity community; mixed races, colours, languages, customs, costumes and so on. I like the whole cosmopolitan feel of inner-city life.”

One of the issues of ageing is often cited as invisibility; especially busy young people ignoring seniors or writing them off as irrelevant and out of touch.

Bakewell, famously the first person to interview Nelson Mandela after he was released from prison, says: “I’m not concerned about that, it’s not something that worries me at all. As long as the people I want to address listen to me. So if you build a family and a circle of friends to support you, your old age will be blessed. I’m fortunate in both.

“My family are very attentive. I’ve got friends who email me all the time. So if you build a family and a circle of friends who support you, then they support you all the time.” But she admits: “I’m 91 now, and the moment you’re 80, you tend to be written off by society as old and doddery with not much to contribute. Now, the old and doddering is arguable, I’m certainly less than I used to be, but I still feel active.

“I’m still a member of the House of Lords where I speak. I still make programmes on television and radio. There’s a danger of expecting people to go into a decline once they hit 70. I certainly don’t believe in that – I believe in a shift in outlook, which makes you a rather different contributor to society.

“Look at the voluntary sector, it’s enormously supported by older people.”

While she believes a new life opens up after retirement, Bakewell is not so naive as to believe everyone will benefit. She fears for the “great many older people who live in quiet desperation because they haven’t got the resources”. On that note, she’s concerned at the Government’s removal of the winter fuel allowance from lower-income pensioners, even though she believes it would be “monstrous” if she were to take it.

“As you get older, your income prospects decline, you can see them declining, and you can’t go out and find new work, you can’t improve your outlook,” she tells me. “That’s a really tricky business. It’s important it’s taken from people like me though.”

She is also broadly supportive of Esther Rantzen’s campaign, supported by the Daily Express and Dignity in Dying, to allow MPs to vote on assisted dying.

As for her own situation, she reveals: “I’ve written a letter, actually. It’s lodged with my lawyer, my children and my doctor. It’s a form of instruction, guidance as to what to do if I become too ill to continue.”

There’s certainly no sign of her slowing down yet. She’s looking forward to the Raworths Literature Festival and visiting local landmark, Bettys Tearoom.

She adds with a smile: “I haven’t made a reservation because I don’t know when I’ll be free, but I’m definitely looking forward to popping in.”

The Tick of Two Clocks by Joan Bakewell (Little, Brown, £10.99) is out now. Visit or call 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25. Joan is appearing at the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival on October 19. Visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com for tickets and information