Eric and Ernie, Wallace and Gromit, Ant and Dec: some double acts are so famous, they don’t need surnames. And to that list we can surely add Phil and Kirstie, whose reign as the undisputed king and queen of TV property shows has now lasted a quarter of a century.
It’s 25 years this week, in fact, since Channel 4 broadcast the first episode of Location, Location, Location – a new format that brought together a pair of young property search specialists, Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, to help buyers find the home of their dreams (or, failing that, to persuade them to have more affordable dreams).
To mark their silver jubilee, the duo have invited Weekend round to Kirstie’s house in Notting Hill – yes, it’s every bit as desirable as you’d expect – to try to unravel the secret of Location…’s enduring success.
For Kirstie, it’s a show that taps into one of our most essential human needs. “Home is a place that’s important to everyone, and everyone aspires to have the best possible home they can, for themselves and their family,” she says. “Home is sanctuary, it’s health, it’s relationships, it’s education. It matters to every aspect of your life.”
“Added to which, we’re all voyeurs – we all love looking around other people’s homes,” says Phil, who lives in a six-bedroom converted barn in rural Hampshire. “It’s a subject everyone has an opinion on.”
“I hope, over the years, people have also come to trust us,” adds Kirstie. “We don’t fake it, it’s not scripted. I don’t want to name names, but there are a lot of shows which purport to be real, but which are actually very heavily edited and produced. Jeopardy became a huge word in television – producers are always asking, ‘where’s the jeopardy?’ From the outset, we never had to worry about that – because with buying houses, jeopardy is built in.”
A few early format tweaks aside, the programme has stayed essentially the same over the years. Having now visited around 1,650 homes in the course of their duties – and that’s not including spin-off shows Relocation, Relocation and Love It or List It – how do the pair stop themselves getting bored, and going into auto-pilot?
“Because it’s different people every time,” says Phil. “If it wasn’t fresh, we’d have packed it in a long time ago,” he adds – though, a bit later, Kirstie admits: “There’ve been times when I wanted to stop, and there’ve been times when Phil wanted to stop. The reason the show still exists is because we never wanted to stop at the same time.”
It probably also helps that, in every episode, they repair to the pub. “We film over three days, so that’s three pub lunches, plus we meet the buyers in the pub at the beginning and the end – so that’s five pubs in each programme,” says Phil. “That’s at least two thousand pubs.”
“We really missed a trick not doing a pub guide on the side,” suggests Kirstie.
Location, Location, Location’s success made overnight stars of its hosts. If you’ve trained as an actor, or joined a rock band, then you might expect fame as a by-product – but it’s not something you’d anticipate when you set up your own property search business. Was it a shock to the system?
“A friend of mine said ‘you didn’t find fame, you stumbled across it in the dark’,” says Kirstie. “I’ve met people who’ve found fame and it’s altered their entire lives. But we were lucky, in that we both had very solid family and friends. So our lives haven’t changed.
“Actually, that’s not true,” she corrects herself. “It’s altered our lives in that you have to be more careful. You have to be on your best behaviour all the time. You feel a responsibility not to let people down.”
“But it’s not like we’re actors, playing a role,” stresses Phil. “We are who we are on the telly.” Kirstie nods. “When people say they feel they know us, they probably do,” she says.
“You have to have the courage of your convictions. You can’t just tiptoe around, saying what you think people want to hear”
Kirstie has said she couldn’t have made those early series of Location… if social media had been around at the time. “If I’d had that feedback in the beginning, I would’ve had no defence, no skin,” she explains. That ‘feedback’ being her occasional skirmishes with the court of online opinion, in which her forthright views on everything from university (she once suggested, only half-jokingly, that if she had a daughter, she’d advise her to “find a nice boyfriend” instead) to screen time (she has admitted to smashing her children’s iPads) have landed her in the stocks.
“Phil told me the question he’s always asked about me is ‘is she as scary as she seems?’” she says. “I was quite upset by that. I don’t see myself as that person. I certainly don’t have the hide of a rhino.”
“This is really down to your own social media,” ventures Phil.
“It’s not,” protests Kirstie. “It’s wildly inaccurate portrayals of things I’ve said on social media by newspapers. They always call it a ‘Twitter controversy’, but if you actually follow me, you’ll see it’s a conversation, with some people agreeing and some people disagreeing. I suppose what I’m saying is, if that had existed 25 years ago…”
“You might have been more careful?” suggests Phil.
“No, because if I had to be more careful, I’d die,” says Kirstie, in a small voice. “I don’t think you should ever be unkind or bombastic or rude. But you have to quietly have the courage of your convictions. You can’t just tiptoe around, saying what you think people want to hear. You have to be able to speak your mind.”
Phil, for his part, stuck to his own guns a few years ago when old footage emerged of him shooting a deer during a hunting expedition. At the time, he explained how, growing up in Kent, he’d been “involved in field sports practically since I could walk”, adding: “It’s something I’m very comfortable about. It’s part of me.” (When I remind him of this, he nods, but says nothing.)
The last time I interviewed Kirstie for Weekend, it was in the midst of ‘washing machine-gate’, when she’d complained about keeping said appliance in the kitchen – prompting many to point out that, unlike the Honourable Kirstie Allsopp (her late father Charles was the 6th Baron Hindlip), most people don’t have the luxury of a separate scullery or laundry room.
It seems comically trivial now. “But at the time it was horrible, watching what it did to you,” says Phil.
“That wasn’t actually the worst one,” says Kirstie. “The worst one, which had nothing to do with social media, was avocados and Netflix, which I have never got over, and still feel incredibly resentful about.”
‘Avocados and Netflix’, to cut a long story short, is shorthand for Kirstie’s alleged claim that buyers would be better able to afford a first home if they cut out certain luxuries. “That was a complete misrepresentation,” she says. “The newspaper concerned had to delete the article and apologise. But none of the subsequent articles have been deleted, so the myth still persists that I have a beef with young people. When the total opposite is true.”
What she’d actually been talking about, she says, are the outgoings you have to declare on a mortgage application. “There’s loads of data around…”
“Anyway, we won’t blow it all up again,” says Phil. But Kirstie is adamant she needs to explain, by the end of which Phil literally has his head in his hands. “That’s enough, that’s enough,” he mutters.
“It’s not enough! It’s incredibly important!” says Kirstie. “But it was never about telling people to give up Netflix.”
In the flesh, Kirstie is nothing like the bossy head girl she’s sometimes portrayed as – and she’s certainly a long way from ‘scary’. What she is, in these heavily brand-managed times, is an unusually open book (how many celebrities invite journalists into their homes, then cluck around making sure you’re properly fed and watered?). There is no PR minder in the room, and no topic is off the table. If she occasionally lands herself in hot water, you feel it’s more through genuine conviction than any desire to be a clickbait contrarian.
Coming from well-to-do backgrounds – his is more modest than hers, but he was still head boy at the private Uppingham School in Rutland – Phil and Kirstie are both sensitive to the ‘privilege’ charge, especially in a country where the prospect of owning your own home is rapidly moving beyond the reach of millions. “But because you’re privileged, it doesn’t mean you don’t have empathy,” insists Kirstie. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have the imagination to put yourself in other people’s shoes.”
“And not many people have travelled as widely around the UK, and gone into as many different types of home, as we have,” notes Phil. “I hope that gives us some insight.”
“Just in the last few days, we’ve been filming with a bricklayer and a primary school teacher,” says Kirstie. “We’ve heard so many people’s stories over the past 25 years. Yes, I think I could have led a very isolated and privileged life. But I don’t think I have, particularly. And that’s because of this job.”
The rocketing price of property over the lifetime of Location, Location, Location has been “societally catastrophic”, says Kirstie. “There are so many factors – deposits, stamp duty, bank stress tests… It’s just got so much harder. And what’s exaggerating it now is the tax situation with landlords. Consecutive governments have thought that bashing landlords was a good way to gain votes – because so many people have to rent, and resent their landlords. But landlords are leaving in droves, and all that’s done is push rents up. In a weird way – and I’m not saying what it might sound like I’m saying,” she adds, no doubt with an eye on the next out-of-context headline, “but democracy is disastrous for homeowners.”
“You’ve lost me,” says Phil.
“Because decisions are always being made with a view to the next election,” explains Kirstie. “So there’s no long-term strategic thinking.”
The housing market might have changed beyond all recognition over the past 25 years – but what about Phil and Kirstie? Over the course of the series, they’ve both got married and had children – Phil has two sons with his Australian wife Fiona, and Kirstie has two sons and two stepsons with her husband Ben, a property developer she wed in January after 21 years of being “happily unmarried”. They’ve also lost all their parents: Kirstie’s mum, Lady Fiona Hindlip, passed away in 2014 after a 25-year battle with breast cancer, and Charles Allsopp died last June. Phil’s parents, Richard and Anne, were killed in 2023 when their car drove off a bridge into a river in Kent.
That’s a lot of shared joy and grief, I suggest, for two people brought together for a TV show 25 years ago. “It’s really strengthened our relationship,” says Phil. “And also, I hope the strength of the advice we can offer. I used to worry that, as we grew older [he’s 55, she’s 53], we’d have less in common with our house hunters. But because we’ve been through so many of life’s ups and downs, we’ve actually got more experience to share.”
While they’ve worked apart – Kirstie branched out into craft programmes, and Phil was briefly a game show host – for most people, the pair will always be one half of Phil and Kirstie. And occasionally, Location… will offer a saucy nod and a wink to the sexual chemistry viewers like to project onto them. (One series opened with the line: ‘We’re back, and we know what you’re thinking – have they or haven’t they?’)
They tell me a convoluted story about checking out of a hotel one morning, that ends with them “coming out of the same bedroom with only one suitcase”, and straight into a lift full of people. “They were clearly thinking, ‘what’s going on here?’” laughs Phil.
In truth, it’s more like a brother and sister relationship, their good-natured bickering underscored by an obvious affection built up over two-and-a-half decades.
“It feels like a real milestone, 25 years,” reflects Phil. “It feels very personal. We’ve always done our best for the show – and for each other.”
Plus they’ve gone all that time without getting cancelled – no mean feat in modern television. “Again, I’d like to think that’s because we haven’t lied, and we haven’t misled anyone,” says Kirstie.
“Or maybe we just haven’t been found out,” suggests Phil.
And, for once, it’s Kirstie’s turn to look worried.
Watch 25 Years of Location, Location, Location at Channel4.com
This interview was first published in Waitrose Weekend on 22 May, 2025
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