The former Hampstead home of Childline founder Esther Rantzen is available to rent for £7,995 a month.
The journalist, activist and television presenter lived in the penthouse apartment in Westfield, Kidderpore Avenue between 2011 and 2021.
Rantzen, now 83, has long been associated with affluent north London. To escape the bombings of World War II, her family moved from Hampstead to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, where Rantzen was born.
(In 1945 they moved back to Hampstead and Rantzen was sent to Sarum Hall School in Eton Avenue in Belsize Park. “They could have called her Scarum Hall,” she wrote in her autobiography. “The headmistress was a real child-hating sadist.”
After a two-year move to Long Island—her father, Henry Rantzen, was appointed chief of the United Nations Telecommunications Division in New York—the Rantzens settled permanently in Hampstead in 1952, when Rantzen was 12 years old.
They moved to 12 Hocroft Road – a house where “I felt so safe and happy,” she told the Times in 2016. “I was allowed to be a child there. I could go out and play with my friends or go to school, and I knew that if I wanted to, I could go home to this safe place where my sister and I were the center of our parents’ world.”
As an adult, Rantzen did not move far away. She married the late television producer, radio presenter and documentary filmmaker Desmond Wilcox in 1977 and they moved into a “big, cheerful house on the edge of the moors”.
Shortly before his death in 2000, she wrote: ‘At our family home in Hampstead we are literally ‘the people who live on the hill’ and enjoy our trips to the local bookshops, Chinese restaurant, theatre, cinema and walks on the moors.
“The most valuable thing for us, as we have learned the hard way, is the health of those we love and the friendship of those we care about. We are like any other old couple who peacefully argue in the garden center and choose tulip bulbs and garden chairs. What a boring couple!”
As a presenter, Rantzen is best known for her work: That’s life!which ran for 21 years. She founded Childline, the helpline for children and young people, in 1986, followed by a similar service for older people, The Silver Line, in 2012. She was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting in 1991, a CBE for services to children in 2006 and was made a Dame in 2015 for Childline and The Silver Line.
According to The Times, Rantzen bought the penthouse apartment on Kidderpore Avenue in 2011 and lived there for a decade. She moved on to her second home, a farmhouse in the New Forest. In 2023, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I sold my two-bedroom flat in north-west London at the start of the pandemic because the city seemed intimidating,” she told the Times. “London is wonderful when you can go to the theatre and concerts, but when everything closed I decided I’d rather be surrounded by trees.”
After Rantzen sold the property, the new owners undertook a major renovation and offered the apartment for rent. Today it spans 132 sq m over two floors, with three bedrooms, an open-plan living area and a 12 sq m terrace with panoramic views of the London skyline.
The Westfield development, which sits on over four acres of land, also offers a swimming pool, gym, underground parking and 24-hour concierge. The apartment is listed with Vita Properties for £7,995 per month.
According to agent Oliver Kent, the penthouse would be suitable for someone like Rantzen looking to downsize, singles or an overseas buyer looking for accommodation in London.
