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The gardens are free of weeds; the 24-hour security service is still in place; the appliances are in good repair. “We’re committed to making sure that the resident is well looked after and that he has all the support he needs,” said Dipesh Patel, a Baker Tilly spokesman.
Yes, the resident. There is just one. His name is Les Harrington, and since last year he has been the only person living in the Homebridge complex, of 58 units on 2.4 acres.
Someday he hopes to get a neighbor.
“It would be nice if, when you’re out there and it’s dark, you could see someone with their lights on or hear the sound of someone’s television set to music,” said Mr. Harrington, 86. “It would be nice to have people, someone just sitting there chatting to you, what they want to do, their families. Anything.”
On the other hand, because there is no one else to give attention to, Mr. Harrington gets a great deal of attention from the people who work at the complex. He is the exclusive concern of a staff of three, who have taken a proprietary interest in his well-being.
Mr. Harrington, who served in the navy in World War II, worked for 32 years as a van driver for the Daily Express, and has the paper delivered every morning. “Keith has told me, ‘If that paper isn’t off your doorstep every day by 8:30, I’m coming in to check up on you,’” he said of Homebridge’s handyman.
Similarly, when Mr. Harrington’s teenage grandson visited one evening with a friend, the security guard on duty immediately telephoned to make sure the pair were guests, not marauders.
But it is still weird to be the only person living in a complex meant for many. Homebridge, built on the site of a former hospital, was supposed to be home to a thriving community of senior citizens living in 34 separate apartments and in 24 suites in a central building. There is a handsome dining room and a comfortable lounge for eating, meeting and socializing.
For several exciting months, three women moved into some of the suites. “I used to go over after lunch, and we’d play tennis and bowls on the Wii screens,” Mr. Harrington said. Then the women moved out.
Now the rooms are all deserted, casualties of a recession that has flattened Britain’s real estate market. The communal rooms give off a too-new smell and have the strange sort of emptiness you find in science-fiction movies, in communities whose populations have mysteriously vanished.
The other day, four tables in the dining room were set for dinner. In the lounge, plush armchairs were grouped amiably around a silent television set. Popular paperbacks crowded the bookshelves.
“They were going to be arranging trips out, as a social thing,” said Mr. Harrington’s daughter, Sherri Kent. “But obviously, because no one moved here, it has never really happened.”
Not that there hasn’t been interest from prospective tenants, with some even putting down deposits. But every time, something has happened to derail the sale, and the expected neighbors have failed to materialize.
Mr. Harrington bought his apartment for several hundred thousand pounds — he can’t remember exactly how much — in 2007, just before the recession came. His late wife, Doris, had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and they could no longer remain in their old house.
Also, Mrs. Harrington was worried about the future. “She wanted to live here so that when she left Dad, she knew he’d be all right and there would be other people to talk to,” Mrs. Kent said.
When they moved in, Keith, the handyman, volunteered to put up a set of shelves for Mrs. Harrington’s lovingly collected Royal Doulton china figurines. “Nobody will ever know what pleasure it gave her in her last three months of life to look up and see that there,” Mr. Harrington said.
Mrs. Harrington died in 2008, three weeks before the couple’s 61st wedding anniversary.
Mr. Harrington is extremely active and comes from a generation that does not believe in lying around moping and feeling sorry for yourself. He sees a great deal of his two daughters and four grandchildren, who live here in Witham, a quiet town in Essex, in southeast England. He walks to the gym and works out three days a week, and stops in most days at the off-track betting parlor.
The author of several short stories published in women’s magazines, he is revising his first novel, “Barney,” a romantic adventure about a pilot named Frank Barnes, set in World War I.
When prospective tenants come to Homebridge, Mr. Harrington always shows them around. But none of the apartments can be sold until a new company buys the development, said Mr. Patel of Baker Tilly. That leaves Mr. Harrington with no immediate hope of getting his own neighbor.
“My dad does like a chat,” Mrs. Kent said. “I would like him to have someone his own age to talk to.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/wo...r=1&ref=europe