The former Hampstead home of Childline founder Esther Rantzen is available to rent for £7,995 per month.
The journalist, campaigner and TV presenter lived in the penthouse apartment at Westfield, Kidderpore Avenue, between 2011 and 2021.
Rantzen, now 83, has long had a connection with the affluent north London area. To escape bombing during the Second World War, her family moved from Hampstead to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, where Rantzen was born.
They moved back to Hampstead in 1945, with Rantzen sent to Sarum Hall School on Eton Avenue, Belsize Park. “It could have been called Scarum Hall,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It had a genuine child-hating sadist as headmistress”.
After a two-year move to Long Island —her father, Henry Rantzen, was appointed as Head of Telecommunications to the United Nations in New York— the Rantzens re-settled permanently in Hampstead in 1952, when Rantzen was 12.
They moved to 12 Hocroft Road – a house which “made me feel 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, when I wanted to, I could go home to this place of safety where my sister and I were the centre of our parents’ world.”
As an adult, Rantzen didn’t move far away. She married the late television producer, broadcaster and documentary film-maker Desmond Wilcox in 1977 and they moved to a “big, happy house on the edge of the Heath”.
Shortly before his death in 2000, she wrote: “In our family home in Hampstead we are literally ‘the folks who live on the hill’, enjoying our trips to the local bookshops, the Chinese restaurant, the theatre, the movies, the walks on the Heath.
“Most precious to us, we have discovered painfully, are the health of those we love, and the friendship of those we care about. We are like any other old couple, arguing amicably our way round the garden centre, choosing tulip bulbs and garden seats. What a dull pair!”
As a presenter, Rantzen is best known for her work on 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 received an OBE for services to broadcasting in 1991, a CBE for services to children in 2006 an became a dame in 2015 for Childline and The Silver Line.
Rantzen bought the penthouse apartment on Kidderpore Avenue in 2011, according to The Times, and lived there for a decade. She moved on to her second home, a farmhouse in the New Forest. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2023.
“I sold my two-bedroom flat in northwest London at the start of the pandemic because the city felt intimidating,” she told The Times. “London is wonderful when you can go out to plays 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 full renovation and put the flat up for rent. Today, it covers 1,428 sq ft over two floors, with three bedrooms, an open plan living space and a 136 sq ft terrace with panoramic views over the London skyline.
The Westfield development, which is set in over four acres of grounds, also offers a swimming pool, gym, underground parking and 24-hour concierge. The apartment is listed with Vita Properties for £7,995pcm.
According to agent Oliver Kent, the penthouse would suit a downsizer, like Rantzen herself, a single person or an overseas buyer looking for a London base.
