Britain | Demography

Hip and hobbling

Not all towns are desperate to attract young people

She liked the seaside before it was cool

IN CHRISTCHURCH, a town on the south coast of England, the coffee shops are packed all day. The cinema, which shows mostly Judi Dench and Maggie Smith films, is booked weeks in advance. An estate agent called “Only Bungalows” does a roaring trade; the weekly market, with its rows of Zimmer frames, its fluttering cotton nighties and its comfortable shoes, is bustling. A local newspaper, a large black-and-white broadsheet with an extra section for late-breaking deaths, has a staff of 50. Need it be added that 37% of the town’s residents are aged over 60?

In London, pricey properties and thriving high streets appear wherever young hipsters go; in the rest of Britain, pensioners often blaze the trail. Coastal towns, increasingly dominated not just by the over-60s but by the over-70s, saw a 128% rise in property prices between 2001 and 2011, above the British average uptick of 119%. Where the old have moved inland, to cathedral cities like Lichfield, high house prices have followed. Ray Nottage, head of Christchurch council, has no intention of chasing yuppies. When it comes to the local economy, he says, “we’re much more sophisticated than that”.

Nationally, an ageing population is a problem. But locally it can be a boon. The over-50s control 80% of Britain’s wealth, and like to spend it on houses and high-street shopping. The young “generation rent”, by contrast, is poor, distractible and liable to shop online.

People aged between 50 and 74 spend twice as much as the under-30s on cinema tickets. Between 2000 and 2010 restaurant spending by those aged 65-74 increased by 33%, while the under-30s spent 18% less. The pension pots liberated by George Osborne’s budget earlier this year will likely pour into property. And while the young still struggle to find work, older people are retiring later. During the financial crisis full-time employment fell for every age group but the over-65s, and there has been a rash of older entrepreneurs. Pensioners also support the working population by volunteering: some 100 retirees in Christchurch help out as business mentors.

Even if they wanted to, most small towns and cities could not capture the cool kids. Mobile young professionals cluster, and greatly prefer to cluster in London. Even supposed meccas like Manchester are ageing: clubs in that city are becoming members-only, and there are an increasing number of places, as one resident puts it, that “a 19-year-old wouldn’t be seen dead in”. Towns that aim too young, like Bracknell and Chippenham, can find their high streets full of closed La Senzas (a lingerie chain) and struggling tattoo parlours. Outside Britain’s capital, high concentrations of youth are commonly tied to high unemployment rates.

Companies often lag behind local authorities in working this out. They are London-obsessed, and have been slow to appreciate the growing economic heft of the old—who are assumed, often wrongly, to stick with products they learned to love in their youth. But Caroyln Freeman of Revelation Marketing reckons Britain could be on the verge of a marketing surge directed at the grey pound, “similar to what we saw with the pink”. The window will not remain open forever: soon the baby boomers will start to ail, and no one else alive today is likely to have such a rich retirement.

Meanwhile, with the over-50s holding the purse strings, the towns that draw them are likely to grow more and more pleasant. The lord mayor of Manchester, Sue Cooley, notes that decent restaurants and nice shops spring up in the favoured haunts of the old, just as they do in the trendy, revamped boroughs of London. Latimer House, a Christchurch furniture store full of retro clothing and 1940s music, would not look out of place in Hackney. Improved high streets then entice customers of all ages.

Indeed, gentrification and gerontification can look remarkably similar. Old folk and young hipsters are similarly fond of vinyl and typewriters, and wander about in outsized spectacles. Some people never lose their edge.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Hip and hobbling"

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