Libraries are full of stories, none more so than the British Library. Not all of them are in books. There is a room there where residents of Camden meet to discuss matters of transport, housing, health, wealth and happiness. A varied group, they have all sorts of tales to tell. The big thing they have in common is being a lot older than the average Londoner.
Late in the summer I was invited to speak at one of their gatherings. Most of those present were women, one of whom revealed, in an American accent, that she was originally from Panama, but has lived in London for something like 50 years. She is also a member of Team London, the mayoral volunteer scheme that began with the 2012 Olympics. Another, in her late eighties, has lived in the borough since she was a teenager – that is to say, as she did herself, she has lived in what became the borough of Camden in 1965. She’d been around the place for some time before that.
There was also a more recent arrival. She had lived for most of her life in and around the Home Counties, eventually settling by the sea. Then, 12 years ago, she asked herself a question: “What do you do on the Essex coast, when you’re getting a bit old and its raining or snowing and the buses don’t work? You might live in an absolutely delightful town, but the number of things going on, particularly if you’re not an arch Conservative, are pretty limited. There are only so many pantomimes you can go to at the amateur dramatics society. So we moved up to London.”
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And why wouldn’t you want to live here when you’re old? Why not reside in a place where you are within easy reach of scores of theatres that put on hundreds of plays? A place where buses run constantly? A place where all sorts of things go on, and do so endlessly? Why not spend your retirement days in what many consider the greatest city on Earth if you can?
There are grounds for believing that more and more older people are answering such questions with a “yes”. Greater London’s population is younger than that of the UK as a whole, with an average age of around 35 compared to 40. Yet its profile has been changing. Both the proportion and the number of Londoners in the older categories are growing.
The 2011 Census estimated that there were 874,000 Londoners aged 65 or older out of a total of 8.17 million, or 10.69 per cent. Ten years later, the figure for over-65s had risen to just over a million and the percentage to about 12.
The 2021 Census is thought to have been affected by many younger Londoners, notably students, leaving the city to stay with parents during the pandemic. Furthermore, the widely-documented fall in London’s birthrate, dramatically illustrated by reductions in demand for primary school places, is contributing to changing balance between the higher and the lower ends of the age range. Even so, no one doubts that older Londoners are on the rise or that this trend is set to continue.
Their distribution across the 32 boroughs has been altering too. The 2011 Census showed the expected larger concentrations of older people in outer London than in inner: Bromley and Bexley had the highest percentages at 16.8 and 16.0 respectively. By contrast, the figure for Camden was 10.8 per cent. But by 2023, this had risen to 12 per cent and is projected to reach 15 per cent by 2041, representing about 33,500 people.
This is part of a large inner London trend. Analysing early results from the last Census for On London, Richard Brown highlighted some of the highest growth rates in England among the middle-aged in Southwark, Lewisham and Lambeth, where there were increases of around 60 per cent in people in the second half of their fifties.
“Some of this probably has its roots in London’s rapid growth of 35 to 39-year-olds in the 1990s,” Richard wrote, and continued: “It is interesting to consider why this generation may have chosen to stay in the city – and in inner London in particular – a rather than moving to the suburbs or a Home Counties village.”
Whatever the mix of reasons, this shift will form part of a London-wide evolution that, according to The London Plan, City Hall’s blueprint for the capital’s long-term development, will result in around 1.5 million Londoners being of or approaching Old Age Pensioner status in ten years’ time out of a projected possible Greater London population of between 9.6 and ten million
But if that rising tide reflects the growing attractiveness of the capital as a place to live for people in their 60s, 70s and 80s, it also means the city will need to become better at meeting their needs. And it won’t all be grey hair amid bright lights.
A report by the Resolution Foundation, published at the start of this year, identified London as the only major city in Britain that is getting older and concluded that these trends “will have profound implications for the local provision of public services, from education to health care”. What is a future, older London going to look like? And what can London learn from it?
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That British Library gathering was a meeting of the advisory group of Age UK Camden, an independent charity that provides a range of activities and services for older people in the borough, from coffee mornings, to digital support to a book club. Among those present who didn’t speak was Costas Louis. He didn’t need to, because he and I had already had a long and fruitful conversation a few weeks earlier, in the British Library’s terrace café.
Costas (pictured) has led a remarkable London life. It began in 1958, when he arrived in the city from north Africa, alone and aged 16. “I wanted to become a wireless operator,” he said. “I thought I could get a job on a liner and travel the world.”
Costas’s parents were Greek, but he was born in Egypt, in the hospital of a British military base, just outside Alexandria. In the multi-national, post-war community he grew up in there, French was the lingua franca and he also learned Arabic, Greek and English as well as picking up some Polish and Italian. As a Boy Scout, he was taught Morse Code. This knowledge, he was told by one of his peers, would be his passport to global seafaring – if he came to London and acquired the right skills.
He rented a room on Clapham Road for 17 shillings and sixpence a week. There was no bath or shower. “I had to go to the public baths,” Costas said “That’s how it was in those days.” And when he applied to a local college, his dream fell apart. “You’re wasting your time, lad,” the administrator said. There was this new invention – teleprinting. It meant wireless operating was dead.
Crestfallen, Costas went to the pub. A mock number plate above the bar inquired “RU18?” Costas avoided the question. Instead, he ordered a Guinness and got drunk. He kept on getting drunk for a month. This was, perhaps, unwise, but it helped him settle in. What did he think of the London of the late 1950s, still scarred by the Blitz and only just free of post-war rationing?
“I loved it,” he says, “because there was so much life. People were happy when they went to the pub. They dressed up as if they were going to the theatre. There was always a piano. People got up and danced.” Londoners were good to him, too: “They treated me nice because I was only a young boy, and because I became part of the community. They liked people to come and drink and join in the singing. I knew all the songs.”
With his savings running out, he got a job in a factory that made gripe water and Roboleine, a vitamin and mineral supplement primarily consumed by children and convalescents. The wages were poor – eight pounds, two shillings and sixpence a week – but the canteen was cheap and the rice pudding, superb. Then he was employed in a distribution centre in Vauxhall, which served the earliest supermarkets. After that, he worked for a fashion trader and did a few other things, including marrying, in a London registry office, a nurse from what in England is called Salonica.
They had a son together, born in Clapham. Then, they moved to Greece. There, Costas studied, became qualified in child psychology, had second son, and was a teacher for a good dozen years. He did well and he had friends. There was a problem, though. From 1967 until 1974, Greece was under military rule. Costas, with his British passport, was sometimes an object of suspicion.
He returned to London in 1973, this time to stay. He’s lived in Camden since 1980. And he loves the British Library, which he can get to on foot in five minutes. “It’s a beautiful building. It’s marvellous. I’m not an architect, but I can look at it and think, yes, this is an institution that makes me feel happy. My idea of the British Library is that it is a gift. It’s a privilege having it in my area.”
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Costas, 85, is not only a member of Age UK Camden’s advisory board, but one of its most energetic volunteers, helping to provide its array of activities and services in the borough. Like many other charities for older people in the capital, it works in partnership with Age UK London, an organisation that campaigns on behalf of older people throughout the city.
There are many issues to address. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) noted earlier this year that there are large differences in “healthy life expectancy” between those who live in the most affluent parts of Camden and those who live in its most deprived – remarkably, a gap of 20 years. Happily, the CQC assessment of the council’s adult social care provision rated it “outstanding”.
The report also serves as a reminder that delivering such services forms a huge part of the responsibilities of London’s local councils. It says that in the financial year 2023/24, Camden devoted 19 per cent its budget to it – just under £114 million out of its total expenditure for that year of £608.5 million. Approximately 1,425 people received long-term adult social care support and around 3,420, short-term. The CQC stressed that every care package is different, tailored to individual needs.
For other boroughs, the figures are smaller, but the percentage higher. Bromley Council, for example, serving a less expensive but proportionately older borough with around 19 per cent of its residents being over 65, anticipated spending around £99 million on adult social care in the current financial year (2025/26) out of a total budget of about £284 million. That’s roughly 35 per cent of it, almost twice as big a slice as Camden’s.
For London’s boroughs as a whole, adult social care is their largest area of spending, higher even than on children’s social care and homelessness. And although London Councils, representing the capital’s 33 local authorities, is taking some quiet satisfaction from concessions it has secured from the government’s initial – and for most boroughs, pretty alarming – Fair Funding Review proposals, increased financial pressure will continue.
An Institute for Government report has found that the proportion of older adults accessing care was significantly higher in Greater London than in other areas, partly reflecting the capital’s poverty levels. Twenty-two per cent of Londoners above state pension age are in poverty after housing costs are accounted for, a rise of four per cent over the past ten years and a higher rate than the rest of England’s. Almost half of those living in social rented homes fall into this category.
What is to be done? A London Councils report last year made the point that “adult social care plays a crucial role in preventing, reducing and delaying the need for more formal care and support” as the National Health Service in London copes with its own pressures. Research by University College London, conducted partly in the capital and published in February, found that home visits to older people assessed as having “mild frailty” could help them to stay well and remain independent.
Meanwhile, Age UK London continues to seek recognition of the needs of London’s poorer older people, and to call for action to address them. In May, it published qualitative research exploring the experiences of older Londoners on low incomes facing financial insecurity, the anxiety these bring and the sacrifices they make to keep their heads above water, including selling possessions and switching off their heating. It contained three individual case studies. One of them was of Costas.
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In the British Library café, Costas told me about the work he does for Age UK Camden. Much of it involves visiting people with dementia, many of them lonely: “I take a book with me, full of old songs and I try to make them happy. We sing Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner or The Old Bull And Bush and they come alive. All of a sudden, you see a smile on their face.” These outings are nostalgic for him, too: “It’s like visiting my mum and dad. People with memory loss, Dave, they are so lovely. All they want to know is about the past – about shillings and farthings and Max Bygraves. Things they find they can still recall.”
Costas also described how, until quite recently, he worked with young adults too, as a mentor to local university students. One group was mainly from overseas and, typically, homesick. For example, “they didn’t know what to do during Christmas”. Separately, he helped undergraduates coping with autism in various forms. “My job was to make sure these kids stayed on, did not drop out in year one, graduated and stood on their own two feet,” he said.
He was paid for doing the latter work and the money was very helpful. It ended, though, when he was 78 and he has felt the loss of income. That is largely because it has limited what he can do for his two sons.
Both need specialist help that he can’t give: the older one, Costas explained, sustained brain damage through a medical error when very small. Today, aged 60, he lives in a care home in Kent. The younger one suffers with what Costas called “psychological problems” and resides in sheltered accommodation in south London. Their mother, Costas revealed, “died a long time ago”.
When he was earning, Costas and his present wife, to whom he became married near the start of this century, were able to take “my boys” on holidays in places where they could be at ease and and was able to visit them often. Now, that isn’t possible. He and his wife live in a one-bedroom Camden Council flat south of Euston Road. It’s in a nice area, but there are some problems with the flat and Costas’s wife has lately been unwell. “I was her butler for a long time because she couldn’t do anything,” Costas joked. He adds that the flat is too small for his sons to come and stay.
His age, too, limits what he can do for them. And now that he and his wife depend for income entirely on the state, there isn’t much to spare for meeting the costs of travel. He puts down some of his affection for the students he used to help to his own children having been unable to go to university: “So those kids were my kids,” he said.
He and his wife have made economies: rather than renew their TV licence, they sold their television; they’ve got rid of their telephone landline; Costas described how they’ve economised on food: “We know that if we buy a packet of rice we can make ten meals with it. In the past, we would have bought two steaks, now we buy one and cut it in half.” They take shorter showers than they used to and they use their oven less.
For all this, Costas remains extremely busy. He has a record of community involvements as long as your arm, including some advisory input into the British Library’s earliest days. Along with caring for others, he writes and has just completed his sixth play. It is called The Befriender and its purpose is to encourage more people to volunteer to help those with dementia. He has long been involved with the world of theatre, including Camden’s Theatro Technis in Crowndale Road, which he has helped in the past with raising funds from the National Lottery. “I try to be involved with the community,” he said, “because if we lose track of it, then we all become lonely people.”
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Today’s Camden is known as a centre of knowledge, principal borough home of London’s Knowledge Quarter, a cluster of research and educational institutions of which the British Library is a part. Although some of its members have been around for two centuries, others are very new and the grouping as a whole tends to be associated with innovation and with youth.
It is, then, encouraging to see Age UK Camden listed as a Knowledge Quarter partner, denoting, perhaps, an acknowledgment that age can bring insight and wisdom as well as infirmity and decline. And in a city where change, often rapid, is a given, older and long-time residents can be a necessary, binding force of continuity, a repository of lived history at a time when London’s past has become contested ideological territory.
London’s future as a city of endless possibility may substantially depend on how it values and cares for those whose tomorrows are mostly gone.
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