Housing in London is very expensive, with an average sale price of over £500,000 for a property as of 2021.
But even if you have a low budget, this doesn’t mean your dream of owning your own property in London is dead.
The first step is to figure out where in London you can find properties you can afford.
I built FindMyArea to help you do this. 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!
Imagine you’re searching for 1-bedroom flats with a budget of £250,000 (this is almost as low as you can realistically go in London). Then you’d enter these criteria into FindMyArea:
Things that are essential to you
- Budget: You can stretch to a maximum of £250,000.
- Property size: You’d like at least 1 bedroom.
- Commute: You want to be able to get into work in less than 45 minutes via public transport. FindMyArea lets you put in your exact workplace but we’ll pretend that you work at Covent Garden Station.
But you don’t just want a cheap area where there’s nothing to do apart from getting stabbed, so you also add the following criteria as nice-to-haves:
Nice to haves
- Dining out: You’d like all the cuisines: Indian, Thai, French, Italian…
- Nightlife & culture: The more the merrier! Cinemas, pubs, theatres, you name it.
- Supermarkets: You’re on a tight budget, so an Aldi, Lidl or Asda would be nice.
- Health & fitness: Working out is important after all that eating – Pure Gym is pretty cheap, so you add that as a nice-to-have.
- Green spaces: You’d like a lot of green space as a respite from the chaos of London.
- Safety: A low crime rate is important to you.
So let’s put these requirements into FindMyArea and see what areas it suggests!
Results
There are only 11 neighbourhoods in London that match these requirements, but the top-matching areas in London have lots of properties within your budget and decent commutes to central London. They also satisfy a reasonable number of your 18 nice-to-haves.
As you might expect, cheap areas are usually close to the outskirts of London, with Barking, Harlington and Plumstead amongst the top matches, as well as areas near Croydon.
Show me where the cheap flats are!
Don’t want to read the whole article? Skip straight to the results:
“Nice” areas
I won’t lie to you: most of the areas suggested wouldn’t be considered particularly “nice”. They’re practical but not pretty; in London you have to be realistic in terms of what you can get for a low price.
For example, you’ll quickly notice that very few of the recommended areas have low crime rates. Unfortunately there’s a negative correlation between property prices and the safety of an area (at least in London!), so it’s very difficult to find neighbourhoods that are extremely cheap, safe and have reasonable commute times to central London.
But to be fair, you should usually be fine in these “less safe” parts of London as long as you take reasonable precautions; random attacks on strangers are not commonplace anywhere. Just try not to accidentally join a gang.
Top pick
With a median price of £230,000 for a 1-bedroom flat, Grove Park in Lewisham would be a good bet if you want to buy an affordable flat with a good commute to central London.
Although Grove Park is not on the tube network, it has a good train service that will get you to London Bridge in 15-20 minutes.
There’s no shortage of lovely green spaces in the area. It also has numerous supermarkets including a Lidl, Co-op and Waitrose; for dining out, however, you’ll probably want to make the short journey down into Bromley, as food and drink isn’t Grove Park’s strong point.
Other options
Barking is definitely not normally considered a “nice” area to live, but if that isn’t your top priority then you can get a lot for your money. Tube and train connections are excellent from Barking station and a 1-bedroom flat costs a mere £200,000 on average. It is also very ethnically diverse, with substantial South Asian and African communities.
Certain areas in Croydon are worth considering if you’re on the lookout for a particularly cheap property: Selhurst, Thornton Heath and South Norwood all have good train connections to central London and lots of green space. It’s safe to say that gentrification has only just started in these areas, however!
With Crossrail stations nearby, Abbey Wood and Plumstead are areas that have also just started the process of gentrification, so they could be solid choices for an investment.
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
Check out the full results via the links in the box below. You can look at the results in detail and adjust the criteria to suit your specific requirements via the “Edit Filters” button.
Where to buy cheap flats in London
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.