“These integrated retirement communities [IRCs] fill the gap between the family home and the nursing home,” says Tom Scaife, the head of seniors housing at Knight Frank. “I visit so many 80-year-olds who are living in one room of their London townhouse because they can’t manage the stairs. We’re letting down a generation if we’re not providing another option before it’s too late.”
Scaife says that Battersea Place, which opened in 2016, was the first upper-end senior apartments in London. They sold at £1 million each and the site is now full with a waiting list. “Since then, and in a relatively short window, we’ve had a lot of IRCs popping up all over London and the Home Counties. ARCO, the body which represents the IRC sector in the UK, says it wants to see a senior living community in every borough.”
Nick Sanderson is the founder and CEO of Audley Group, whose first London scheme – Nightingale Place in Clapham – opened in 2020. It’s more like a private members’ club than a retirement village. Two thirds of the flats, priced from £750,000, have now sold. Sanderson says the typical buyer sells a “4-5-6 bedroom family home” to move there and can enjoy on-site hydrotherapy, opera performances, a gym and a cinema.
“When I set up Audley in the Nineties, the customer was very different in attitude to today’s 77-year-old (the average age for someone to enter a retirement community),” he says. “This generation grew up in the Sixties, they’ve travelled the world, they’re university-educated, they’re part of the tech revolution and they live a great lifestyle. They’re fit and active and they’re not willing to accept the misery of ageing.”
Sanderson, who was recently part of the government’s Older People’s Housing Taskforce, says Heythrop College is a “frustrating site”. Surprisingly, given it would’ve been a direct competitor to Audley, he says it’s a shame it won’t be going ahead. “We’re better served by there being more high-quality retirement villages,” he says. “People still have this idea of a miserable nursing home in their heads and they doubt that a place like us can exist. So the more people see it, the more they’ll believe it.”
Although posh retirement homes are on the rise here, the UK still lags behind the US, New Zealand and Australia, where the industry is treated as a thriving part of the hospitality sector. In the UK, 0.6 per cent of over-65s live in later-living communities, compared with six per cent in the US.
So what went wrong at Heythrop College? It took 15 months for Zenoprop to wrangle planning permission because of concerns over the amount of affordable housing at the plot, and in August 2023, developers asked the local authority for permission to postpone its commitment to build five affordable homes on the site, claiming inflation had made the project a “financial burden”. They were eventually forced to sell up at the end of 2023. It’s just the latest twist for a site which has already had an interesting history. The Victorian building was previously owned by French nuns and was for decades a convent school known as The Maria Assumpta Centre. In 1993, the Jesuit training school Heythrop College moved in (which had been located at Heythrop Hall in Oxfordshire since 1926), and offered Church qualifications as well as degrees from the University of London’s philosophy, theology and social sciences departments.
But in 2018, due to recruitment difficulties, rising costs and “changes in government financing”, the Jesuits closed the college. It was the first significant UK higher education institution to completely close since the dissolution of the original University of Northampton in 1265. The college’s library of 150,000 books – considered one of the finest collections of theology and philosophy in the country – was moved to Senate House. So what’s next for the empty Heythrop College? Most likely a luxury hotel. Arora, who now owns the site, specialises in airport hotels, such as the Sofitel at Heathrow and Gatwick. So perhaps the venue could still take off, even if plans for an aspirational retirement village are currently grounded.
KPF and Arora declined to comment; Zenoprop or Auriens have not responded to requests for comment