I have a couple of questions for you.
- Are you moving to London?
- Do you have a high income?
- Are you looking for areas in London that meet your requirements?
If you answered yes to all three questions, then read on!
(The title of this article is a bit of a lie. Rich people often don’t have particularly high incomes, largely because they don’t need to work for a living.)
Money can’t buy happiness, but…
…not having any can make you pretty damn miserable :-P
While you certainly don’t need a lot of money to enjoy London, the sad truth is that the experience you have of life in this fine city is hugely dependent on your income.
Ask Londoners what they dislike most about living in the city and you’ll hear a consistent theme of “horrible, packed commutes” and “accommodation is too expensive”.
Money solves the second problem directly – Londoners spend an uncomfortably large percentage of their income on housing. This isn’t a great place to be if you work in a low-income sector but also want to save a lot of money.
As for commuting, the best-connected areas in London are typically also among the most expensive. You can also choose to live in central London if you have a sufficiently high income, meaning that you have the option of walking to work and leisure activities. Which is pretty great for your mental health (conversely, experiencing daily rage at fellow commuters is not so good for your general wellbeing).
“Where should I live in London?”
London is big. Very big.
But you can also think of London as a collection of villages, each of which has its own distinctive character, all connected by a public transport system that is the envy of Japan er… the rest of the UK.
Even if you’ve lived in London for many years, chances are that you’ll only know a lot about a handful of these villages.
What do you know about living in Rotherhithe? How about Hanwell? Walthamstow?
Some of these areas might be exactly what you’re looking for. Others, not so much.
That’s why I built FindMyArea. It’s a free tool where you pop in the stuff you care about (budget, commute destinations, local amenities etc) and then it gives you a list of areas in London (e.g. Hackney or Richmond) that satisfy your requirements.
Let’s see it in action!
If you have a sufficiently high income, you should be able to find areas in London that give you almost everything you want within reason. However, you likely will still need to compromise on the size of the property in one way or another unless you’re a Russian oligarch (in which case you should drop me a message so I can send you my bank details).
For the price of a 1-bedroom flat in central London, you can get a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool up north. Of course, you wouldn’t actually be able to use the pool because it’d be too damn cold, but it’d still be pretty cool to have one.
Keeping all this in mind, you might have the following requirements for the area of your dreams…
Things that are essential to you
- Budget: You only want to see properties over £700,000 – anything less than that is for the plebeians.
- Property size: The bigger the better, but you’re realistic and will even consider 1-bedroom flats if the location is perfect.
- Supermarkets: Waitrose. Add organic multigrain quinoa tofu to the basket please.
- Dining out: You’d like all the cuisines: Indian, Thai, French, Chinese…
- Green spaces: You’d like a lot of green space as a respite from the chaos of London.
- Like-minded people: You’re against inequality, which in your mind means everyone around you should also have a high income.
Nice to haves
- Commute: You want to be able to get into work in less than 30 minutes via public transport – but this is just a nice-to-have as you work from home most of the week. FindMyArea lets you put in your exact workplace but we’ll pretend that you work at Covent Garden Station.
- Nightlife & culture: The more the merrier! Cinemas, bars, theatres, you name it.
- Health & fitness: Going to the gym is important after all that eating – either a Virgin Active or Nuffield Health in the area will do. You also want to live in an area where people are generally in good health.
- Low crime rate: Safety is important to you.
So let’s put these requirements into FindMyArea and see what areas it suggests!
Results
Looks like there are a lot of good matches! All 9 of your essential criteria and almost all of your 14 nice-to-haves are satisfied by the top-matching areas in London.
You can see that most of your matches are concentrated close to central London, but there are a few options further out if you want to be away from the hustle and bustle.
Show me where the best areas are!
Don’t want to read the whole article? Skip straight to the results:
Top picks
Mayfair. South Kensington. Chelsea. Knightsbridge. Although they’re in the list of top matches, you probably already know that rich people live in these places. So let’s focus on the slightly less well-known options.
Marylebone gives you access to all the nice elements of central London while also being fairly quiet and close to both Regent’s and Hyde Parks. The high street is a great place to shop and dine out, and walking for 15-30 minutes will take you to anything from the British Museum to the vibrant Edgware Road to Buckingham Palace!
Transport links are excellent, with the hubs of Baker Street, Paddington and Marylebone Stations able to get you very quickly to other parts of London (including Heathrow Airport) and indeed the rest of the country.
All this comes at a price, of course. The median price for a 1-bedroom flat is £650,000 and for 2 bedrooms you’re looking at close to £1.5m. Notice that this is a huge discrepancy – exactly what constitutes a “1-bedroom flat” is often just down to the imagination of the estate agent (also, 2-bedroom flats in Marylebone tend to be exceptionally large/fancy – you can definitely find a decent 2-bed place for closer to £1m).
If you’re looking to rent instead of buy, you’ll find that areas like Marylebone suddenly look a lot more affordable. You can easily find a good 2-bedroom flat in this area for £2,500-3,000 pcm, which certainly isn’t cheap but is much more doable than trying to purchase an equivalent property in the same area.
If you want to be slightly further out (or if you just want to get a bigger place for your money), consider Belsize Park, Hampstead, Angel, Battersea or Richmond.
You can easily buy a 2-bed flat for under £800-900k in each of these areas. Richmond in particular is a superb place to live if you want to feel like you live in a village, and arguably has the best park in London – the major downside is that it’s much further out than the other options, although the fast train from the main station gets you to Waterloo in around 20 minutes.
Also great
If you have slightly different requirements, you can use FindMyArea’s Edit Filters button to adjust your criteria without having to start over. Let’s see what happens if you drop the requirements for a high household income and lots of green space.
You can see that some of the recommendations shift towards east central London, e.g. areas around Clerkenwell and the City.
All these options are great, but east central London has a very different feel from the west, most of all in terms of having far fewer tourists. These areas are definitely worth considering if you want to be away from the tourist hordes while still having all the other advantages of being central.
I’ve chosen some areas. How do I find out more?
If you want to research some areas more thoroughly, you could just use Google.
But to make your life a bit easier, FindMyArea creates a personalised “detail” page for each area that only shows the stuff that matters to you.
Just click on any area in the list or map to see its detail page.
From here, you can do further research into anything that particularly interests you:
- Click on “View Properties” to see property listings for your chosen area
- Click on any of the local amenities to see where they are on a map
- Click on the commute time to see the actual commute route itself, complete with directions
- Click on “Read More” to see the Wikipedia description of the area
Basically, just click on everything and you’ll see all sorts of useful stuff!
Don’t want to lose your results and criteria? Just hit the “Save Results” button to save everything to a permanent shareable link (no need to create an account).
When you’re ready to return, just use the shareable link to retrieve the same results again. You can also adjust your criteria some more if any new requirements have come up.
Try it for yourself
Take a look at the full list of areas to live in London if you have a high income.
You can look at the results in detail and adjust the criteria to suit your specific requirements via the “Edit Filters” button.
Or enter your requirements from scratch to find the perfect area in London for you.
Thanks for reading! If you want to help me improve FindMyArea, you might like to join the beta program. Or just drop me a message the old-fashioned way for general comments and questions.