A Place to Call Home: Choosing Where and How You Live

Introduction

Ask most working people why they live where they do, and the honest answer usually begins with the job. The house was within reach of the office, the school run fitted around the shifts, the commute was bearable, just. We choose postcodes the way we choose so much in working life: by what the work allows. Somewhere along the way, the place we live stops feeling like a choice at all.

Early retirement quietly removes that constraint. Once no employer needs you within an hour of its door, a question that may not have been asked for decades comes back into view: where would you actually like to live, and how? For some people the answer is the coast or the hills, a smaller home, or a village with a proper high street. For others it is a street nearer the grandchildren, a shared community of like-minded neighbours, or a new life abroad. And for many, after thinking it through, the answer is right where they are, but with the time at last to belong to the place rather than simply sleep in it.

This chapter is about that freedom. It is closely related to others in this book: to family (Chapter 4), to friendship and community (Chapter 5) and to travel (Chapter 8). But the choice of home deserves a chapter of its own, because it shapes every day that follows: who you see, how you move, what you do and how easy it will be to keep doing it as the years go by.

We will look at what research says about moving in later life, belonging to a neighbourhood, living near family, age-friendly places, co-housing and retiring abroad; meet five people who changed where or how they live after leaving work early; weigh up the real risks, from loneliness to stamp duty; and finish with practical ideas and questions to help you think about your own place.

What the research tells us

Free to choose: why people move in later life

For most of our working lives, the job decides the postcode. We live within reach of the office, the factory or the hospital, and we trade space, quiet or proximity to family for a tolerable commute. Research on why people move in Britain shows how powerful that tie is, and how it loosens with age. Using geocoded microdata for Great Britain, Thomas (2019) found that moves made for employment accounted for only about 30% of migrations over 40 km. Family motives were just as important, even for moves of 100 km or more, and the most frequently cited family reason was the wish to live closer to relatives or friends who lived elsewhere. Job- and education-related moves were most common among young, highly educated people; moves for family reasons came disproportionately from people in midlife and later life.

Work shapes where families end up, too. In a UK household survey study of middle-aged couples, Chan and Ermisch (2015) found that better-educated couples lived farther from their parents, and that how close generations lived to one another was driven mainly by the factors that affect long-distance moves, which are chiefly linked to the labour market. In other words, many of us live where we do, and far from whom we do, because of our careers.

Retirement is one of the moments when that can change. Analysing the British Household Panel Study from 1991 to 2007, Evandrou, Falkingham and Green (2010) found that among people aged 50 and over, those in late middle age (50–59) and the oldest old (90 and over) were the most likely to move. Moves were strongly linked with recent changes in partnership, health and economic status, and the authors identified life events such as divorce, widowhood and retirement as important triggers. Early retirees, by definition, reach that trigger during the more mobile late-middle-age years.

Where do people go? Official statistics show that older people make up a larger share of the population in rural and coastal areas than in urban areas. All ten of the UK local authorities with the highest proportion of people aged 65 and over are on the coast, five of them in the South West of England, while nine of the ten with the lowest proportion are in Greater London (Office for National Statistics, 2018). The Chief Medical Officer’s 2021 report on coastal communities suggested that this older age profile is likely driven by migration out of large cities as people grow older (Department of Health and Social Care, 2021).

It is worth keeping this in proportion. Most older Britons stay put. Comparing older people in Britain and the United States, Banks et al. (2012) found that Americans downsize their housing much more than the British, largely because they are much more geographically mobile, helped by a wider spread of amenities such as warm weather and of housing costs across the country. Moving in later life is a choice, not an inevitability, and that is precisely the point: once work no longer fixes your location, the choice becomes yours.

Does moving make life better?

The most useful British evidence on this question comes from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Finney and Marshall (2018) followed 9,300 core ELSA members from 2002 to 2012, 852 of whom moved house during that decade, and measured wellbeing with the CASP-19 scale, which covers control, autonomy, self-realisation and pleasure. The most common reason given for moving was to find a more suitable home (42.2% of moves), followed by health reasons (20.0%), wanting to be nearer friends or family (17.6%) and moving to a better area (14.5%). The researchers classed 62% of moves as voluntary and 38% as involuntary, the latter including moves for health reasons, financial difficulty, eviction or the end of a relationship.

After taking account of demographic and socio-economic differences, involuntary movers had lower wellbeing than both stayers and voluntary movers. Voluntary movers maintained their comparatively high wellbeing over time, while involuntary movers saw the age-related decline in their wellbeing level off after the move. The authors concluded that migration in later life is good for wellbeing, but they also acknowledged real limits: the voluntary/involuntary split is crude, people with poorer wellbeing were more likely to drop out of the study, and there was no information on where people moved to. Voluntary movers also differed from the start. They were younger on average (61.6 years at baseline, against 64.6 for non-movers) and wealthier, with almost a third (31.4%) in the richest fifth of the sample (Finney and Marshall, 2018).

American evidence adds an important qualification. Using six waves of the Health and Retirement Study from 1996 to 2006, Bradley and Van Willigen (2010) found that the effect of moving on depressive symptoms varied considerably from person to person. Moves prompted by negative life events or circumstances were particularly associated with depressive symptoms, and later-life moves appeared especially stressful for women and as people grew older. The authors suggested that how stressful a move proves may depend on how well people become socially integrated at their destination.

What about downsizing specifically? Despite the attention it receives, we found little robust UK research that isolates the effect of moving to a smaller home on wellbeing. The nearest evidence is the ELSA finding that moving to a more suitable home, the single most common reason for later-life moves, was classed as a voluntary move and was associated, on average, with maintained wellbeing (Finney and Marshall, 2018). The honest summary is that a chosen, planned move seems to go well for most people; a move forced by crisis is harder, even if it can still stabilise a difficult situation.

Belonging: why the neighbourhood matters

If moving is about choosing a place, the research on “place attachment” is a reminder of what we are really choosing. In focus groups and interviews with 121 people aged 56 to 92 in two communities in New Zealand, Wiles et al. (2012) found that older people valued ageing in place for the sense of attachment, security and familiarity it gave, both in their homes and in their wider communities. Place was bound up with identity, through independence and through caring relationships and roles in the places people lived. Tellingly, participants also wanted choices about where and how they aged.

Quantitative studies point in the same direction. In a cross-sectional study of 945 independently living adults aged 70 and over in 72 Rotterdam neighbourhoods, Cramm, van Dijk and Nieboer (2013) found that neighbourhood social cohesion, neighbourhood social capital and neighbourhood services all predicted older people’s wellbeing. Being single or poor was linked with lower wellbeing, but these effects were mediated by neighbourhood services, social capital and cohesion, suggesting that good neighbourhoods may partly buffer personal disadvantage.

Longitudinal data from England add weight. Ruiz, Scholes and Bobak (2018) analysed 11,037 ELSA participants aged 50 and over, whose sense of neighbourhood social cohesion was measured in 2002/03 and whose depressive symptoms were then tracked on seven occasions until 2014/15. People who saw their neighbourhoods as less cohesive had more depressive symptoms, and the gap widened with age. Among those aged 85 at baseline, average symptom scores rose from 1.09 to 1.30 for people reporting high cohesion, but from 1.49 to 2.03 for those reporting low cohesion. These associations held after adjusting for socio-economic and health characteristics. In the United States, Kim, Hawes and Smith (2014) followed 5,276 adults over 50 with no history of heart disease for four years and found that each standard-deviation increase in perceived neighbourhood cohesion was associated with 22% lower odds of a heart attack, after adjusting for age, gender, race, marital status, education and wealth; the association remained after further adjustment for behavioural, biological and psychosocial factors.

These studies measure how people perceive their neighbourhoods, so people who feel low may also judge their neighbours less kindly. But the consistency of the pattern chimes with the Blue Zone villages in Chapter 5, where older people see neighbours daily and remain in the thick of community life. When choosing where to live, the social fabric of a street or village may matter as much as the view from the window.

Near the people who matter

For many people, the freedom to move is above all the freedom to live nearer family. Wanting to be closer to relatives or friends was the most frequently cited family reason for longer-distance moves in Great Britain (Thomas, 2019), and accounted for 17.6% of later-life moves in ELSA (Finney and Marshall, 2018). Chapter 4 looked at what grandparenting means for grandparents; here the question is the location decision itself.

Swedish register data covering all older parents and their adult children in 2001 and 2002 give some insight into how that decision plays out. Pettersson and Malmberg (2009) found that moving close to an adult child was more likely where other family members, such as siblings and grandchildren, were present. Moving very close to adult children was more common among the “young-old” than the “old-old”. The authors’ interpretation was that younger older parents often move near their children for social contact or to help them, whereas care becomes the main concern later in life. The UK picture is shaped by work as well as affection: Chan and Ermisch (2015) found a slight tendency for couples to live closer to the woman’s parents than the man’s, more pronounced where there was a child and neither partner had a degree, but concluded that the labour market was the main driver of how far apart generations live. Early retirement removes one side of that equation, though not, of course, the working lives of one’s children.

Age-friendly places and new ways of living together

Some places make it easier to grow older well than others. In 2007 the World Health Organization published a guide based on focus groups with older people, carers and service providers in 33 cities in all WHO regions, including London. It identified eight areas of city life that shape how age-friendly a place is: outdoor spaces and buildings; transportation; housing; social participation; respect and social inclusion; civic participation and employment; communication and information; and community support and health services (World Health Organization, 2007). The WHO Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities now includes 1,829 cities and communities in 60 countries, covering more than 400 million people (World Health Organization, no date). For someone weighing up a move, the eight areas work well as a practical checklist: Can I walk to the shops safely? Will I still be able to get about if I stop driving? Are there clubs, volunteering roles and a GP surgery within easy reach?

Some people are going further and designing their own communities. Senior co-housing, in which residents have their own homes but share common spaces and run the community together, is still rare in the UK. Fernández Arrigoitia and West (2021) carried out mixed-methods research with what was then the UK’s only established senior co-housing community, which is for women only. Their findings, which they describe as not yet conclusive, suggest a model of later-life living built on interdependence, commitment, learning and even love, rather than simply a lifestyle choice for a privileged few. In Spain, Delgado-Losada et al. (2026) compared 83 people living in senior co-housing with 88 living in conventional homes. Co-housing residents were better off, and their healthier lifestyles were no longer significantly different once education, occupation and income were taken into account; but co-housing remained associated with less social loneliness and greater social support. The study was cross-sectional and small, so it cannot show that co-housing causes these benefits, but the finding is consistent with everything else in this chapter.

There is also a quieter argument about timing. Later-life moves appear to become more stressful with age (Bradley and Van Willigen, 2010); the Swedish researchers interpret their data as showing the “young-old” moving for contact and the “old-old” for care (Pettersson and Malmberg, 2009); and the attachment, security and familiarity that older people value in a place (Wiles et al., 2012) are built through years of living there. None of these studies tests early retirement directly, but taken together they suggest an advantage in choosing where to put down roots while you are fit enough to join in, make friends and become part of the place.

Retiring abroad

For some, the freedom to choose extends beyond national borders. International retirement migration was first studied mainly within Europe, particularly among northern Europeans moving to the Mediterranean, but researchers now describe new destinations further afield, such as Thailand and Ecuador, and a broader range of class and wealth backgrounds among the people who move (King, Cela and Fokkema, 2021).

The experience can be positive. In interviews and group discussions with 58 British retirees living in the Valencia region and the Balearic Islands, and four who had returned to the UK, Legido-Quigley et al. (2012) found high satisfaction with Spanish health care, valued for its thoroughness, cleanliness and humanity, even though people were less positive about other Spanish public services. The exceptions were transport to health facilities, personal care in hospitals, long-term care and pain relief, which compared unfavourably with the NHS. For retirees with limited means, moving abroad can also be a financial strategy: Repetti, Phillipson and Calasanti (2018) found that for many northern Europeans living permanently in Spain, the move was a way of managing economic risk and improving their financial situation and status, while also introducing new vulnerabilities that became visible with Brexit.

The practical rules matter. You can claim the UK State Pension abroad if you have paid enough National Insurance contributions, but it only rises each year if you live in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, Switzerland or a country with a social security agreement with the UK that provides for increases (Canada and New Zealand do not). Elsewhere there are no yearly increases, although the pension goes up to the current rate if you return to live in the UK (GOV.UK, no date a). In 2019 the Department for Work and Pensions estimated that around 510,000 UK State Pension recipients living overseas did not receive increases, 84% of them in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Department for Work and Pensions, 2019). For an early retiree who may draw a pension for thirty years or more, a frozen pension can lose much of its value in real terms.

Lives enriched: real stories

Elizabeth Vickerie — from Tower Hamlets to the lambing shed

In 2017, at the age of 63, Elizabeth Vickerie handed in her notice after more than 30 years in education. She took early retirement and moved from east London to a 47-hectare organic farm near Bath (Kalia, 2023). Her career had not gone to plan. As a girl she dreamed of becoming a vet, but was steered into teacher training instead. She taught in South America and then rose to become senior education officer for the London borough of Tower Hamlets. “But I never imagined I’d end up leaving the city altogether for a different life,” she said.

The move began with romance. In 2011 an online matchmaking site paired her with Richard, who lived on a farm in Somerset. For five years she travelled out from her east London home to visit him, until the commute began to take its toll. Then she moved to the country to help run the business full time. She brought in a flock of Wiltshire Horn sheep: 20 at first, and 70 by 2023. Her childhood love of animals had come back in a new form: “the first time I pulled a lamb out of a ewe, I danced around the stables and felt like it was the most wonderful moment of my life” (Kalia, 2023).

She is clear about why the change suited her. “The ability to be outdoors and see the seasons coming in is an absolute joy,” she said. “It’s been so good for my mental health and since I’ve always been a very busy person, I wouldn’t have done retirement well.” She is also open about the harder parts. Running a business with a partner takes compromise, and as they both get older the couple have begun handing parts of the farm over to others. Her verdict is plain. “This move has been a life-saver,” she said. “I needed a new challenge and I haven’t regretted it at all” (Kalia, 2023). For her, early retirement did not mean stopping work. It meant choosing a new place, and a new kind of work to go with it.

Bob and Ann Paton — the dream house that came with six acres

In their fifties, Bob and Ann Paton were living in Newcastle upon Tyne and planning “one more move”. Their checklist for the dream house was short: “Northumberland, stone-built, a bit of character and a reasonable garden.” The house they found ticked every box but one. Instead of a reasonable garden, it had six acres. Walking the grounds, Bob turned to Ann and said: “We could turn this into a small farm.” Eleven days before his 60th birthday, he retired as a managing director with the IT company Accenture. Ann had already sold her deli, and together they began to farm (Cocozza, 2022).

The first two years were a struggle. The fields were badly fenced and waterlogged, the soil was poor, and they dug up thousands of stones. Bob, a coal miner’s son from Ashington, drew on memories of his father’s allotment. The turning point came in summer 2018, when an adviser from the Soil Association told them they were making fantastic progress and advised them to stop digging, to protect the soil structure. By 2022, trading as Hexhamshire Organics, they had an orchard, polytunnels, 50 varieties of vegetable and a field of Tamworth pigs. They were selling 100 organic vegetable boxes a week and supplying Northumberland’s only Michelin-starred restaurant. “I used to say I retired, but now I say I had a career change,” Bob said (Cocozza, 2022).

Ann is more modest about it: “We are an elderly couple growing vegetables in Northumberland.” They have never worked so hard, and the work is labour-intensive. Asked how much longer they want to keep going, Bob said: “I don’t want to stop, ever.” Ann added: “While we can, we will” (Cocozza, 2022). Their story shows how the choice of where to live in early retirement can end up shaping everything else.

John King — a year-round life on a Scottish island with no electricity

John King had worked as an architect and retired early. He met his wife, Lynn, at a yoga class he was teaching at the age of 61 (Beddington, 2023). In 2014, after the death of the centenarian aunt he had cared for, the Hertfordshire couple felt it was time for a new beginning. “Lynn said to me: ‘We have no need to live here; where do you want to live?’” In June 2014 they moved to a rented stone cottage on Eilean Shona, a tiny, virtually uninhabited island off the Ardnamurchan peninsula. The cottage was two miles from the island jetty down a stony track, and a two-hour journey from the nearest shop. It had no electricity, central heating or phone line. They used candles and a gas-powered fridge, did the washing in buckets, and he brought in fuel by boat and quad bike (Beddington, 2023).

It was not easy. The north-facing cottage got no direct sunlight from the end of October to early March. Lynn had to walk at least 20 minutes to find a mobile signal to call her elderly father. Yet King remembers it as “a time of healing, renewal and personal growth”, and as “an opportunity for us to step out of the normal world and do our own thing.” Their days were set by the tide, the light and the weather (Beddington, 2023).

The pair left the island in 2017 after three and a half years, aware that such a physical way of life would not be possible for ever. They still live remotely in Ardnamurchan, beside an ancient oak wood, where King bathes in the burn every day. The couple have no intention of moving again. “It’s a gentler life,” he said (Beddington, 2023). His story carries two lessons. A bold move can be one chapter rather than the whole story, and knowing when to adapt is part of choosing a place well.

Siobhan Daniels — selling the flat and making the road her home

Siobhan Daniels was a nurse for nine years before joining the BBC as a trainee at 31. She later worked as a news reporter and producer at BBC South East. In her fifties she struggled badly with the menopause and lost her mother and eldest sister. At work she felt “pushed into the back room”. “I was absolutely done. Burnt out,” she told the Guardian (Cocozza, 2021). She retired at 60 (Living North, 2022). She gave up her flat in Kent, disposed of most of her possessions and moved into a two-berth motorhome (Cocozza, 2021). “I needed to find another way of living,” she said. In September 2019 she set off “with genuinely no idea where I was going” (Living North, 2022).

The road was not always kind. When Covid struck she found a field to stay in at a Lancaster campsite. A later lockdown left her alone in the motorhome in Norfolk for five months. That Christmas her pipes froze and her daughter could not come to visit, which she called “another really low point”. She pulled herself round by broadcasting live conversations on Instagram. She then went on to give talks to Women’s Institutes and write a book, Retirement Rebel (Living North, 2022).

When the Guardian interviewed her at 62, she was parked on a farm in Dorset, where she volunteers in exchange for free electric hook-up. She admitted she misses her daughter, Sammy, and a hot bath. But she had no doubts. “I’ve made a lifestyle choice to live with very little, to be free and to travel,” she said. “And I’ve never been happier” (Cocozza, 2021). Her story suggests that the freedom to choose where you live can include choosing not to have a fixed address at all.

Sara Wasem — when early retirement is not a choice, a home that fits

Not everyone chooses when to leave work. Sara Wasem, who lives near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, had to take ill-health retirement at 54 from her job as a learning disability nurse after major surgery on her spine. “It was very hard to take as I was forced to do it which I didn’t like and I loved nursing,” she said (Meyer, 2023). Retiring on health grounds meant she could draw her NHS pension early. She used part of the lump sum to pay off her mortgage. Her income fell to about £20,000 a year, including disability benefits, compared with around £60,000 when she was working.

After both her parents died, an inheritance let her move somewhere better suited to her disability: “a new ground floor flat with its own patio and garden and is just bliss.” Living there with her rescue cat, Lottie, she volunteers every week visiting hospice patients at home. She was also setting up a café for carers in a local community space. She has joined the National Trust and a bus tour company for day trips and holidays (Meyer, 2023).

Her advice is honest: “I wish I’d been better prepared.” She urges others in her position to research the help they are entitled to, including disability benefits, and to use places such as Citizens Advice (Meyer, 2023). Her experience is a useful reminder for this chapter. Sometimes the most important home decision is not a dramatic move but finding a place that fits the body and life you actually have.

A balanced view

The evidence in this chapter is encouraging, but it needs careful reading. Almost all of it is observational, and selection effects are everywhere. The people who move voluntarily in later life are younger and wealthier than those who stay (Finney and Marshall, 2018); co-housing residents are better off than people in conventional homes (Delgado-Losada et al., 2026); and the neighbourhood studies rely on people’s perceptions, measured once, which may reflect their mood as much as their streets (Cramm, van Dijk and Nieboer, 2013; Kim, Hawes and Smith, 2014; Ruiz, Scholes and Bobak, 2018). Much of the research on retiring abroad is qualitative and based on small samples. We found little robust UK evidence on downsizing in particular, and no good data on how often people come to regret a later-life move, so we cannot put a number on that risk.

Moving can cost you the very things this book argues matter most. Later-life moves appear more stressful when they follow difficult events, for women and as people get older, and the outcome may depend on how well people integrate into their new community (Bradley and Van Willigen, 2010). Chapter 5 described how retirement already prunes the outer circle of our social networks; moving away from friends, clubs and neighbours can remove the inner circles too, and it can take years to rebuild them. Moving to be near family carries its own risk: the same labour market that separated the generations in the first place (Chan and Ermisch, 2015) may later call your children elsewhere.

The idyll does not always match the reality. The Chief Medical Officer observed that the pleasant environment of the coast “attracts older, retired citizens to settle, who inevitably have more and increasing health problems” (Department of Health and Social Care, 2021, p. 2), and analysis by Health Education England for the report found that, despite their older and more deprived populations, coastal communities had 14.6% fewer postgraduate medical trainees, 15% fewer consultants and 7.4% fewer nurses per patient; work in many coastal towns is seasonal and services can be stretched (Department of Health and Social Care, 2021). In rural areas, older people face longer journeys to key services and less public transport, and because driving rates fall with age, some can become isolated (Office for National Statistics, 2018). A village that is perfect at 55, with a car and good health, may be much harder at 80.

Retiring abroad adds further risks. Interviewing frail older British people in Spain, Hall and Hardill (2016) found language, cultural, spatial and financial barriers to getting care, and warned that some vulnerable people may fall through a support gap, no longer the responsibility of UK services yet not fully recognised in their new country. Political change can also rewrite the rules, as Brexit did for Britons in Spain (Repetti, Phillipson and Calasanti, 2018), and a State Pension frozen in some countries (GOV.UK, no date a) and exposed to exchange rates can erode over a long retirement.

Finally, moving is expensive. In England and Northern Ireland, Stamp Duty Land Tax is charged at 0% on the first £125,000 of a home’s price, 2% on the next £125,000, 5% on the portion up to £925,000, 10% up to £1.5 million and 12% above that, and you usually pay 5% on top of these rates if you will own another residential property after the purchase; Scotland and Wales have their own taxes (GOV.UK, no date b). Add estate agents’ and legal fees and removal costs, and a move can absorb a meaningful part of the capital released by downsizing. None of this argues against moving. It argues for moving deliberately: testing a place before committing, keeping ties with old friends, and choosing somewhere you could still live well if your health or mobility changed.

Putting it into practice

• Ask the question on purpose. Before you assume you will stay or go, write down what the job decided about where you live, and what you would choose now that it doesn’t.
• Rent before you buy. Spend a month, or a winter, somewhere you are thinking of moving, as the seasons and the off-season can change a place completely. John King and Lynn rented their island cottage before deciding what came next.
• Use the age-friendly checklist. Walk the high street and ask the World Health Organization’s questions (2007): could you get to the shops, the GP and the station without a car? Are there clubs, volunteering and places to meet people?
• Picture yourself at 80, not just 60. Choose somewhere you could still live well if you stopped driving or your health changed, or have a clear plan for the next move.
• Put roots down quickly. Join something in your first month: a choir, a walking group, the parish council, a community garden. Belonging is built, not found (Wiles et al., 2012).
• Keep your old friends. Plan visits and calls before you move, so the inner circle survives the change of address.
• Moving near family? Talk first. Ask your children about their own plans, and whether they may move for work, before you follow them.
• Do the sums. Include stamp duty, fees, removals and any work on the new home in your figures (GOV.UK, no date b). If retiring abroad, check how your State Pension would be uprated there (GOV.UK, no date a) and get independent advice. (This book is not financial advice.)
• Staying put counts too. If you stay, use your new time to get to know your neighbours, your streets and your local groups. You may find you have been living somewhere wonderful without noticing.

Questions for reflection

1. If your job had never existed, where do you think you would have chosen to live?
2. What three things does a place need for you to feel at home: people, landscape, services, a sense of history, something else?
3. Who do you want to be able to see without planning, and how far away do they live now?
4. Picture a normal Tuesday in the place you are drawn to. What do you do, and who do you talk to?
5. How would that place suit you at 80? What would you need to change, or plan for?
6. What would you miss most about where you live now, and how could you take it with you?
7. If you stayed exactly where you are, how could you belong to your neighbourhood more fully than you do today?

References