Brook Green

Brook Green's streets are lined with tall Victorian terraces and mansion blocks split into flats, the kind of streetscape that photographs well and rents fast, with private-school girls in boater hats crossing paths with commuters and pram-pushing parents outside the delis. This is a dense, well-heeled pocket of Hammersmith and Fulham — density here runs at roughly five times the national average, and it feels it, but the money and the period stock keep it from feeling cramped or scruffy.

The transport picture is strong without being flashy: Goldhawk Road Underground sits alongside Shepherd's Bush's Central line and rail options, and Hammersmith's Circle and Hammersmith & City lines are within reach too, so this is a genuine zone for people who need central London on tap. Schools are where the area quietly overperforms — the average Ofsted rating across local schools is strong, and names like St Paul's Girls' School and Bute House Preparatory sit alongside the state sector's Flora Gardens Primary, rated Good, with Miles Coverdale Primary carrying the Outstanding label a little further out. A median age in the mid-thirties suggests this draws settled professionals and young families rather than students or retirees, and the school offer supports that reading. Housing, though, is where the trade-off bites: this is overwhelmingly flats, and leasehold at that, with freeholds a small minority of sales — a For Sale board here almost always means a lease and a service charge, not a garden of your own. Prices sit close to the borough median but roughly 17% below the wider Hammersmith and Fulham benchmark, and the local five-year price trend has been heading down rather than up, a genuine change from the froth of a few years back.