Luxury care in Highgate: a Signature approach

Bishop’s Avenue in North London – better known as ‘Billionaire’s Row’ – runs from Hampstead Heath towards East Finchley and the A1. Famous for its eye-watering house prices (homes on the 66-house street typically sell for tens of millions of pounds) and rows of ostentatious mansions, it is perhaps an unlikely location for a brand new care home. 

Walking down Bishop’s Avenue on a cold morning in late January to visit Signature at Highgate – Signature Senior Lifestyle’s latest luxury London care home – passing one mega-mansion after another, each with high security gates and unscalable walls, I couldn’t help but wonder “who lives here?” over and over. In fact, if press reports are to be believed, many – perhaps even a majority – of these enormous properties lie unoccupied – expensive investments invariably registered in offshore tax havens and left empty

There is still plenty of activity on Bishop’s Avenue, however, albeit of the construction variety – not least next door to Signature’s latest, where retirement living provider Riverstone is hard at work building its Riverstone Bishops Avenue development of retirement apartments (and penthouses) for a 2025 opening, with a price tag that may even exceed that of Signature of Highgate.