The impact of place-based inequalities on ageing and social care research

This commentary proposes a renewed place-based understanding of ageing and social care research, drawing together evidence from an updated review of interventions for social isolation and insights from public engagement in contrasting urban and coastal settings. Despite a longstanding policy emphasis on ‘ageing in place’, structural conditions across England remain uneven, with rural and coastal communities often experiencing shrinking services, limited transport, digital exclusion, and fragile social infrastructures. Our updated umbrella review of 75 recent publications indicates that psychological, social, and hybrid interventions can reduce loneliness, but their impacts are inconsistent, often short-lived, and rarely examined across different geographical settings. We found no study adopted a genuinely place-based framework, leaving questions about how local environments shape both risk factors and intervention effectiveness. Insights from community engagement in London and coastal Lincolnshire further illustrate how place influences everyday experiences of ageing, highlighting shared challenges, such as fragmented services, digital barriers, and rising living costs. Whereas urban location-specific issues included isolation amid density, geographically close inequalities, and limited continuity of services, by contrast, people in coastal communities cited transport deprivation, seasonal and precarious economies and the erosion of community spaces. Taken together, these findings show that spatial inequalities are widening and that research failing to account for these, risks reinforcing them. A strengthened place-based research agenda is needed to ensure interventions are equitable, context-sensitive, and grounded in lived experience.