If you want to understand today’s most profound lifestyle trend, dive into the crowds streaming out of High Street Kensington Tube station in West London. As you head left past packed cappuccino bars, caught between pretty twentysomethings busily picture-messaging friends and guerrilla-marketing teams pitching free fashion makeovers, look closely at every passing Vuitton-toting, Nokia-wielding hand and count how many are displaying wedding rings. If your unscientific survey is anything like ours, you will struggle to find more than a quarter of working-age women here signalling that they are married.
Welcome to the capital of Singleton Britain. According to official statistics, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea has proportionately more single-person households than anywhere else in the country, with 48 per cent of homes now occupied by one person, typically somebody still of working age. Of course, as one of London’s more expensive neighbourhoods and a particular magnet for young careerists, it makes sense for much of the housing stock to comprise small apartments unsuitable for a family. Yet as Britain undergoes a dramatic shift towards more solitary living, the single-person flat is fast becoming the most common type of household.
“I can’t see what all the fuss is about,” says Sue Rose, a designer in her mid-30s, sipping a latte in Caffè Nero. “Most of my girlfriends have lived alone for years and it’s not as if there’s anything weird about it. That old-fashioned idea that if you’re unmarried by your thirties you’ve somehow failed; well, it might have bothered my parents’ generation but you can hardly take it seriously nowadays.”
Just around the corner, in Adam and Eve Mews, Mary Balfour has been watching these social priorities change over the past two decades. In 1986 she took over a two-year-old dating agency called Drawing Down the Moon. Since then, she says, any stigma attached to single life has gradually evaporated, while the educated professionals she specialises in have become far more relaxed about meeting their potential partners.
“I’m noticing a greater confidence in people happy to see being single as just another stage in life,” she says. “Back in the Eighties it was still unusual to admit to membership of a dating club but today it’s as much a badge of singledom as gym membership. Our members are anything but desperate, but in the Eighties the single person was a little like Bridget Jones. Now Bridget Jones is really old hat.”
Her women clients, in particular, enjoy being single, she says; their challenging jobs are more important to them than settling down. “It’s probably the first time in history that women have been able to buy property and to live alone without needing to bring up a family,” Balfour says. “We don’t need to rush into relationships for economic survival. I’m finding that older people in particular don’t want to cohabit any more. They want love and fidelity in their relationships, but they’re happy in their own home. They love the single life and they want someone around for two, maybe three days a week. It’s nothing to do with unhappiness or loneliness; they simply want the icing on the cake.”
These radical social changes are far more than a matchmaker’s impressions. Government statistics point to an extraordinary shift in Britain’s household structure over the past generation. The proportion of one-person households almost doubled between 1971 and 2001, rising from 17 per cent of our homes to 31 per cent. By 2010, according to official forecasts, that proportion will increase to 40 per cent, making the single-person home the most common household unit; more common, for example, than two-parents-plus-family ménages or single-parent-and-child abodes.
The causes range from later first marriage to easier divorce and the “increased affluence” that the Henley Centre, the futures consultancy, says allows singles, especially women, the historically novel privilege of choosing to live alone. Partly, of course, it is because we are living for longer, although that fails to explain why the under-65s make up 70 per cent of Kensington’s single-person households. What is clear is that the traditional advertising image of the 2.2 children family is increasingly unrepresentative of people’s experiences.
To understand how the rise of Singleton Britain will change our lives, Body&Soul consulted some of our most eminent demographers, sociologists, economists and trend forecasters. Their overall message is stark: policymakers, housebuilders, marketers, even the restaurant industry, are going to have to adjust. The “power of one” is here to stay. “The happy, married family as the norm is a myth,” says Malcolm Williams, a sociologist at the University of Plymouth who has just led a detailed study into the changing make-up of our households. “It might actually be that diversity is now becoming the norm. And that’s going to have huge economic implications.”
Advertising will have to change. “The picture of the happily married nuclear family will matter less and less,” he says. “You’ll also buy different kinds of food if you live alone, so the decisions about what supermarkets sell will no longer be based on the consensus of family groups.” This demographic revolution will also affect health policy and social care. “If you’ ve got people living alone, they haven’t got somebody to look after them for relatively minor illnesses. That will be costly for the NHS.” Williams’s study found a growing tendency for those living alone to report long-term health problems.
The main pressure, though, will be on housing, particularly on the urban areas where single people tend to congregate. “But there’s a paradox,” he says. “The Government sees building more houses as a solution but that doesn’t necessarily resolve the issue if you’ve got such a huge mortgage gap (between affordability and prices). The solution would be to provide more housing for rent, or for us to rethink what housing is for: consumption or gain?” What surprised Williams most in his research was the discovery that people who live alone in early adulthood were far more likely to do so again. “We didn’t expect that,” he says. “But if you’ve already lived alone in your twenties, maybe it makes you more self-sufficient, more prepared emotionally and practically to do so again. Living alone becomes a lifestyle choice. That’s a positive thing, giving you considerable resources to draw on in old age.”
Sarah Harper, who runs the Oxford Institute of Ageing, is equally optimistic. “People are choosing to remain single,” she says. “Women especially are surviving much more successfully living alone, whereas before at 35 they’d be expected to be married with children. If there’s a problem group, it’s lone men aged 50-plus, who are more likely to suffer health problems such as alcoholism and depression. Increasingly it’ s women who are instigating divorce and choosing not to remarry or necessarily to cohabit and, for the men left behind, who find fewer natural opportunities for making new relationships, that can mean less social interaction.”
There is more bad news for men in the Government’s forecast for Britain in 2010. The report’s author, Richard Scase, concluded that single women in their thirties and forties had the well-developed social networks and confidence that men lacked. Men defined themselves more by their work, and relaxed with too much unhealthy food and drink, a recipe for isolation and loneliness, Scase suggested. Single women, by contrast, were more likely to see friends, explore their spiritual side and relax with yoga.
