Rob Blackhurst

April 8 2008

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A wind-blasted promontory in Britain's north-west, halfway between genteel Lancaster and kiss-me-quick Morecambe, seems an unlikely place to stage a revolutionary social experiment. But here, overlooking the gunmetal grey of the Irish sea on one side with the Pennines on the other, Britain's largest retirement village, Middleton Towers, is being built on the site of a former Pontin's holiday camp. Nearly 600 bungalows, mews houses and penthouses are planned for the village, which will be completed by 2013. To those over the age of 55 with between Pounds 150,000 and Pounds 450,000 to spare, it is being billed as a retirement Shangri-La.

There have been retirement communities in Britain before. But Middleton Towers is different: an attempt to import the spirit of Florida into a damp corner of the English north-west. In the US, 5 per cent of Americans choose to see out their retirement in huge enclaves or ''super-sunshine estates'', and Britain is slowly catching up. According to the Elderly Accommodation Council, a charity that advises older people on their housing needs, there are 67 retirement communities in the UK, double the number there were two years ago.

In the freshly tarmaced car park next to the sales centre at Middleton Towers, couples in their early sixties are wrapped up against the cold in fleeces and sensible shoes, spilling out of equally sensible saloon cars. They circulate around the prefab sales centre examining floor plans of the prototype houses: ''The Grange'', ''The Silverdale'' and ''The Coniston''. Overhead, a DVD plays computer-generated images of the planned cafes, swimming pools and restaurant, edited together with footage of bottle-blonde pensioners frolicking with grandchildren. A silvery, square-jawed doctor is shown discreetly taking a pensioner's blood pressure. The voice-over promises a ''daily programme of nutrition and safe exercise'', ''a pet-sitting service'' and ''first-class hotel facilities''.

At the moment, Middleton Towers is far from idyllic, with its hillocks of building rubble. But Mark Phoenix, the sharp-suited and slicked-haired young managing director of Prestigious Retirement Villages, is full of sales confidence: ''The other retirement villages are very institutional. This is not going to be a geriatric community for people looking at the end of life. In the States it's all about lifestyle and enjoying yourself.''

It has long been assumed by developers that Britain's cold climate, tight planning laws and cool emotional reserve would make large-scale retirement villages impossible. But that assumption now seems wrong, particularly as the generations who bought houses for a few thousand pounds in the 1950s and 1960s can afford a more luxurious retirement. ''People over 55 in this country own Pounds 500bn-worth of property,'' says Phoenix.

It is these affluent middle classes that retirement villages want to attract. Pensioners reliant on meagre state benefits would not be able to afford the service charges - not just for utilities and security, but also for basic help cooking, washing and dressing. All these services are offered within the ''villager's'' own home, offering far greater independence than a care home.

Phoenix and I head out in a golf buggy - one of a fleet that will be used by residents - to tour the building site, passing a group of workmen laying the turf for the crown bowling green. Today, the handful of buyers that have moved in so far are behind their curtains. The private beach is not made up, Florida-style, of powdered sand and turquoise waves, but of mudflats and murk. The sun-kissed retirement dream feels more than an ocean away.

Katie Hall shows us around her first-floor apartment. It is indistinguishable from flats for young metropolitan professionals - all beige paint, brushed steel and mosaic tiles - apart from the doors, which are wide for wheelchair access, and the oven, which is high on the wall to spare arthritic knees. Hall is in her eighties: upright and vivacious, like an old-fashioned schoolmistress. She has moved here from a remote Lancashire hamlet. ''The care home aspect was worrying me a bit. I thought 'I can't stand going into a place full of old people.' Here you've got stages of help - which is attractive to me. You don't have to be terribly decrepit and don't need full-time care.'' And does she miss the sound of children playing or teenagers laughing? ''I've got over that with the grandchildren. They've grown up now. But there is a village atmosphere here - everybody knows everybody else.''

For all the promise of wellness suites, spa pools and manicured grass verges, it is the towering electric gates at the front of the complex that attract many to Middleton Towers: ''We won't get a house broken into on this site. We have one road in - one road out,'' says Phoenix.''You can't get on to the site unless you are a visitor that has already been pre-arranged.''

''A lot of (the residents) prefer adult situations rather than those with children,'' says the company's marketing manager Lorraine Sinclair. ''If you want to go for a swim here, there are no ball games.''

There seems a tension, too, between the lifestyle dream of Middleton Towers funded by the ''grey pound'' and the dispiriting realities of physical decline. Phoenix realises that this might damage the ethos of ''feeling fit and healthy and secure and enjoying early retirement'' - in a place where the average age is just 66. ''Putting a nursing home at the centre of the village is completely the wrong thing to do. People die in nursing homes. So why would you want them to be in the middle of where everyone lives? You are far better off having the nursing home as a facility tucked away to the side.''

Across the Pennines lies Hartrigg Oaks, a retirement community near York. It was built 10 years ago by the philanthropic trusts of the 19th-century Quaker and chocolate manufacturer Joseph Rowntree as a social test-bed for retirement living. And it is what the owners of Middleton Towers say they are desperate to avoid: a village of 152 bungalows with a community centre and a nursing home, The Oaks, at its centre.

The village is a run like an old-fashioned mutual society: everyone pays in the same ''community fee'' of around Pounds 10,000 a year (plus an initial sum of around Pounds 250,000, refundable on death, to buy their bungalow) regardless of how much of the home help or nursing care they need. Since the young and fit subsidise the old, newcomers have to join the scheme before they are 69. When a bungalow becomes available, applicants are scrutinised to check whether they would be a net drain on the community - those with a fading short-term memory, heart disease or Alzheimer's disease are likely to be refused. This levelling philosophy is evident in the bricks and mortar. Where Middleton Towers stresses consumer choice, the bungalows at Hartrigg Oaks look identical. Newcomers have two simple choices: one bedroom or two, with or without a loft conversion.

The scheme is attractive to those who worry that their savings could otherwise be eroded by a huge bill for nursing care. John Kennedy, director of care services for the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, who runs Hartrigg Oaks, says: ''If you live in here for 10 years and then you drop dead one day, financially you could say that you paid a community fee every day and didn't get a lot for it. But if you did need care, then the cost to you and your estate would be limited. You can plan. Anything that is left is secure from the cost of care.'' It's an attractive scheme, but so far it is unique: no commercial provider is willing to take on the huge potential liabilities of guaranteeing care.

I wait on a bench outside The Oaks, where I've arranged to meet Tony Dale, the head of the residents' association. A black estate car parks next to me. Two men in dark suits silently open the boot, put on surgical gloves and erect a fold-up metal trolley. ''We've got the undertakers in this morning,'' says Dale, with a grim handshake. ''Last month was awful. There were five deaths.'' A brisk, precise former university vice-chancellor in his 80th year, Dale is a ''veteran'' who has lived at Hartrigg Oaks with his wife Janet since it opened. Having cared for elderly parents themselves, the couple did not want to pass on the same burden to their children: ''They've got to be able and they've got to be willing,'' says Dale. ''I suspect they would be willing, but able is another matter altogether.''

In the reception of The Oaks, under vaulted beams and amid the faint smell of disinfectant, a student-union style felt board is pinned with notices of clubs and societies: Lectio Divinia (sacred bible reading), line dancing, short-mat bowling, lectures on Russian politics. There is a fortnightly Communion, taken by one of three Anglican priests resident in the village. And there have even been University of the Third Age lectures, given by a retired astrophysicist, on the origins of the universe. Upstairs in the library are not curled copies of Reader's Digest, but The Tablet and the United Nations Association newsletter.

Such interests reflect the high-minded ''Hampstead-liberal'' complexion of Hartrigg Oaks. A quarter of the 250 residents are Quakers, mainly, it seems, because the complex was heavily promoted in The Quaker magazine. These are the worker bees who ran Britain's postwar institutions. ''They tend to be white-collar,'' says Dale, ''and there are a huge number of women who have been in the caring professions - nursing or teaching. They have an awareness about old age and their needs.''

Sinking into a bulky settee at the side of the dining room, I meet John, 70, a former charity director who moved into Hartrigg Oaks four years ago after a heart bypass. His wife was only 61 when they joined. ''We agonised because 61 was very young to go into this place. But the younger people go into these places, the more they get out of it. They assimilate quicker.''

Communal living had a big attraction for him: ''My wife had worked on a kibbutz in Israel. We had enjoyed living with other people in a small community in Birmingham back in the 1960s.'' But what is it like to live in a community surrounded by the infirm and dying when he is still in his active sixties? ''People say 'Isn't it depressing when somebody is wheeled out dead?'. I find the opposite - it becomes part of normal life that people die. I now know where I will die, as far as I can arrange it - in The Oaks, a few yards from my bungalow, eating food that is the same as I eat today. There will be no change of diet in hospital.'' Living in the shadow of death allows him to appreciate life, he claims. ''Tick the boxes about one's death and old age and you can get on with the business of living. We are living very fully. It's important not to be too institutionalised. The table-tennis club is our main preoccupation. We play three times a week to keep in practice.''

But the community's rich social ecosystem - teeming with former managers - can lead to tensions. ''You have 250 people. A significant chunk held serious responsibility in their lives. In terms of leadership, people setting things up, it's terrific. But the price you pay is that a lot of people quite fancy being big fish in small pools. Some people feel 'We are responsible people. We ought to be running this place.'''

There is a powerful evangelical streak in Hartrigg Oaks - of long-delayed passions fulfilled, of infirmities overcome and neighbours assisted. I heard of dementia sufferers who, with coaxing, were able to draw on the recesses of their memory to recite epic poems. This community spirit can be overwhelming for the less sociable newcomers. ''There have been about a dozen couples who have left. It has often been one member of a couple who didn't really settle,'' says Tony Dale. He admits that the village can be a hothouse: ''There is a lot of gossip, and not all of it is nice or fair. You get a handful of people who, for whatever reason, like stirring it up all the time.''

In an airy room at The Oaks nursing home, Margaret, a 90-year-old retired GP, has just been discharged from hospital. She is propped up with a walnut Roberts Radio next to her, taking occasional breaths from an oxygen mask. Margaret has just agreed to give up her bungalow and move into the nursing home full-time. Despite apologising for rambling, she speaks with precision in a hushed 1940s accent, describing the mobile clinic that she drove around the Yorkshire Dales after the war, gathering data on the health of mothers and children. She is comforted that she should be able to die in familiar circumstances: ''You feel secure and there is help if you need it here. You want to be able to just slip away quietly at the end if you can - so that's what I'm trying to do.''

But while some slip away gradually, others are struck by sudden illness; Hartrigg Oaks protects both. In Tony and Janet's bungalow, Martha stops by for coffee. She joined the village with her husband four years ago, reluctantly, as they felt it was too early. In his early seventies, Philip has developed Alzheimer's. ''It was just completely unforeseen,'' says Martha. She has had to make use of the panic button in her bungalow to summon assistance when her husband has become aggressive: ''I get hysterical sometimes and need calming down - and Philip needs care away from me for a short time. The care workers are wonderful - homely, approachable and matter of fact. The last two weekends I've been quite despairing.'' But she has found middle management ''a little distant. You don't see them very often,'' she says. ''They are not easily accessible unless you are very assertive.''

This is a common complaint in retirement villages: even in places as well-run as Hartrigg Oaks, the management are, in practice, a benign autocracy, with necessarily strict powers over the residents' lives. This can be a great source of frustration, according to Bernadette Bartlam, lecturer in social gerontology at the University of Keele, who has studied retirement communities: ''We know very little about why people move out. It tends to be around not being able to abide the cliqueyness and finding that they really are at the mercy of management. It's alright for residents to organise the bowling, but if you want to get engaged in the strategic management of the village that's never going to happen.''

Perhaps the fiercest argument against retirement villages is that they are ''grey ghettoes'', where the elderly are shunted off to die out of sight. In the 1970s, when they first emerged in the US, they were denounced by Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers, a radical senior citizens' activist group, as ''glorified playpens - a trivial, purposeless waste of their years and their time''.

But if it is unhealthy that the elderly live segregated from the rest of society, then this is merely holding up a mirror to social trends that have been long under way: the growing number of older single people because of divorce; the trend for children to live hundreds of miles away; and the affluence that allows people to pay for the care that families would once provide. As John Gooding, the chief executive of Retirement Villages, a company that runs several communities in central and southern England, says: ''It is unrealistic to have this idea of old people living within apartments in a mixed community where the housewife next door is popping in to make them a cup of tea. It ain't happening.''

Retirement villages tend to suit the solid, the consensual, the stoical, those who are willing to take an unflinching look at their inevitable decline. Margaret died a fortnight after I interviewed her, ''very peacefully'' - according to friends at Hartrigg Oaks. Not for her the sudden dispatch to a nursing home, surrounded by strangers, but a farewell with the neighbours that she had known for the past decade.

Not everyone will want to pass away like this. For the coming generation of baby boomers, retirement villages could seem like hell. As John Kennedy, who runs Hartrigg Oaks, says: ''To some people it is utopia. To others it would be the last place on earth they'd want to live.''

Some names have been changed.