City pads are attracting the 'Uggs' - Urban grannies and grandads with no plans to slow down.
Seven years ago Margaret Boden decided that the time had come to sell the business that she had spent two decades building and throw herself into a new challenge: retirement.
To most women old enough to qualify for a bus pass, that might have meant moving to a cottage in the countryside. However, Boden defied expectations and used the money from the sale of her cafe to buy a city centre crash pad in a landmark modern building.
Boden, 67, and her husband Albert, 70, had been living in the genteel coastal village of Blundellsands, Merseyside. The couple's five children had long since left home and the couple were, frankly, bored. Last summer, when she saw the super-modern One Park West developement - a few minutes from the Albert Dock in Liverpool - she was smitten. "I knew that I had to have it," she says. The couple paid £70,000 for a studio flat and kept their seaside property in an Art Deco mansion bloack as a weekend getaway. Now Boden's days are a whirl of shopping, meeting friends, lunching and cinema trips. A £15-a week service charge takes care of all the cleaning ("I've swept my last set of stairs") but their independence is intact.