Sarah Beeny: TV presenter and former owner of Rise Hall in Yorkshire reveals she has cancer

The 50-year-old presenter and property expert is best known for her work on UK property programmes, including Help! My House Is Falling Down and Sarah Beeny’s New Life In The Country.

In her Beeny's Restoration Nightmare show, she turned the Grade II* listed Rise Hall into a wedding venue, which she then sold in 2019.

In an interview with The Telegraph, she said she had “a little bit of a breakdown” after being diagnosed in a hospital consultation room.

Speaking to the newspaper, she said she began chemotherapy last week and will have a mastectomy and radiotherapy in the New Year.

She cut off her hair at the weekend with the help of her children and husband, and said: “Graham was trying to cut it nicely, but the boys – well, they’re not going to be famous hairdressers.

“They said I looked like Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones – I mean, she’s beautiful so I was sort of flattered, but my hair is now about a centimetre long in some places and it’s an inch long in others.”

Sharing a post on Instagram on Tuesday morning, she wrote: “A little pile of not very good condition hair on it’s way to @officiallittleprincesstrust – my trainee hairdressers cut off my hair on Friday night – getting one step ahead after first chemo treatment for breast cancer on Friday – the exclusive club you’d rather not be a member of!”.

Despite her diagnosis, Beeny said she will continue to work and is focused on a new Channel 4 series and book she has planned for later this year. She added: “I’m lucky because I live in a family where we all talk.”

She said she plans to draw on her “inner strength” throughout treatment. When she was 10, Beeny lost her mother, 39, to breast cancer.

She said of her own diagnosis: “The nurse was so sweet and they were really nice to me but I thought, ‘You don’t understand. I have waited 40 years to hear those words.’ I knew I was going to hear them one day.”

Beeny has four children – Rafferty, Laurie, Billy and Charlie – and married her husband, artist Graham Swift, in 2003.

In 2010, she began to chart the renovation of Rise Hall, a Grade II-listed stately home in Rise, East Yorkshire, as part of Channel 4 series Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare. Beeny and Swift worked to renovate Rise Hall as a family home and wedding venue, then sold the property in 2019.

In March that year, she revealed she was quitting London to move to a seven-bedroom house in Somerset with Swift and their sons. The couple bought the 220-acre sheep farm in August 2018 and Beeny later said she had decided to make the move permanent after considering her children’s education.