First published in The Times on 2 September 2023
Breast cancer, says Sarah Beeny, overshadowed her life much more before she was diagnosed with it herself. She was just ten years old when her mother, Ann, died of the disease, and she had been half-expecting to find a lump ever since.
When she finally did, in early 2022, it happened to be a few days before a routine mammogram, so she flagged it at the appointment and was reassured that everything looked fine. Four months later, however, she noticed the lump had grown. Her GP sent her to the breast clinic at her local hospital, where she was quickly moved from examination to ultrasound to biopsy. If you find something, she now cautions, don’t rely on a mammogram alone. “If you have a lump, you need to go to your GP and insist, absolutely insist that they refer you to a breast clinic.”
Her diagnosis, last August, was frightening after decades of dread, but it seems she was relieved to have a concrete problem to tackle head-on, which is very much Beeny’s modus operandi. “Definitely handling the reality [of cancer] seemed much easier than imagining it beforehand, because you feel somehow in control,” she says. Then she pauses, and adds a caveat: “Although, actually, you’re not.”
Ann was 39 years old when she died, after six years of illness. Beeny, a property expert who has been presenting Channel 4 shows since 2001, is now 51. She explored the parallels between her and her mother’s treatment in a poignant documentary, Sarah Beeny vs Cancer, which aired in June on Channel 4, and confirmed how much better the prognosis is for breast cancer today. “I feel I’m very, very fortunate — really in all areas of life,” she says. “I feel lucky with the diagnosis I got, and that I had it in 2022 rather than 1974.”
Chemotherapy was followed by a double mastectomy with reconstruction; she doesn’t like to use the term “all clear”, but she finished her treatment in January and tells me she feels very well.
We’re used to seeing Beeny with blonde hair to her shoulders, but today, at a café in London, it is cropped, revealing magnificent cheekbones. She looks strikingly beautiful. She describes herself in her new memoir as a “fully qualified control freak”, but to put it more kindly she is a pragmatic woman who likes to take action; before chemotherapy she got her sons — Billy, 19, Charlie, 17, Rafferty, 15, and Laurie, 13 — to give her a pre-emptive short haircut. Of course, a few weeks later, she lost it all.
A year on from her diagnosis, life is back on track. “I do see it as a blip,” she says. She has a few inches of thick hair now, which she’s pleased with; she wore wigs for a while, but eventually auctioned them off for charity. “Now I don’t look like I’ve lost my hair with cancer,” she says. “I love it when people assume that I’ve cut it because I had a midlife crisis.”
She has been open about her experience, in the hope of helping others, but it’s clear that she’s keen for this chapter to be forgotten. When I ask whether she has changed anything in her lifestyle post-treatment — more exercise, perhaps, or less booze — she is firm. “No, I made a very active decision to not be any different at all,” she says. “I’d be happy to change my life if it was because something fun or exciting had happened, but it doesn’t feel positive to change my life because of cancer. I would imagine that in a few months’ time I won’t ever have to talk about it again. I don’t want the words ‘when I had cancer’ to be part of my life.”
We all know very well that Beeny is happy to change her life for something exciting, because we have watched her do it on TV. The first big (and, as she puts it in her book, “truly stupid”) decision was when she and her husband, the artist Graham Swift, bought Rise Hall — a dilapidated, 32-bedroom stately home in Yorkshire — and followed this with a 2010 TV show about turning it into a wedding venue. The second was in 2018, when they moved onto a 220-acre former dairy farm in Somerset and built a baroque-style mansion there (cue another show: Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country).
The latter move is covered in particular detail in her memoir, which tells the story of all the homes she has lived in (and sometimes rebuilt from the ground up). The title — The Simple Life — is laughably inaccurate. Beeny still runs property businesses, presents TV shows and oversees these enormous renovations with Swift while raising four children. She is full of ideas for the future, from building an arts and media centre for young people in Somerset to writing books tailored to dyslexic kids. Her phone rings constantly while we talk.
She freely admits her four arty boys have had a privileged upbringing. Beeny’s childhood in Hampshire was different. Her parents lived a self-sufficient, eccentric life — in their garden were two cars on blocks, where Ann stored bags of clothes.
Beeny’s description of this is charming; in fact she makes every home she’s had, including the van that she moved into at 18, sound chaotically idyllic. However, she’s quick to clarify. “My parents were mad, you know,” she says. “My childhood wasn’t completely perfect, but when I look back, I think, ‘I’ll just pick out the bits that were quite perfect.’ My husband always says it was flipping weird — and it was.”
After losing her mother at a young age, she struggled at boarding school. “I’ve got four dyslexic sons,” she says. “I was just called ‘thick’ at school, but possibly I might be dyslexic as well. My reports were so bad: ‘She’s going nowhere’.”
Perhaps because of her unmoored start, she always hoarded family mementoes and knick-knacks. The book details the huge, cathartic clear-out she did as part of the move to Somerset. “I was carrying a lot of balls and chains with me everywhere, and actually I’ve realised that some of this sentimental stuff is in my head,” she says. “All that stuff that you associate with a person — it’s not them. My mother, for example, hasn’t died — it’s just her body isn’t here, but she’s inside me and my kids, and every time we talk about her she exists.”
Today, with her phone buzzing next to us, and her mind full of plans, it is clear that Beeny is keen to let go, in more ways than one.
Sarah Beeny’s perfect weekend
Lark or owl?
Lark
Town or country?
I think the town feeds your heart and the country feeds your soul
Novel or Netflix?
I find both quite difficult, because I can’t sit still. Boring!
Gym or sofa?
Both dreadful. I’d rather go for a walk than to the gym
What’s your signature dish?
A fish or chicken pie
Wine or water?
Wine
How many unread emails do you have?
Probably only a thousand
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
My dogs