Catford

Catford's high street tells you most of what you need to know before you've read a single statistic: the shopfronts are a mix of Caribbean grocers, pound shops and chicken takeaways, punctuated by the odd new café trying its luck, and the flow of people through it is constant, dense, and unglamorous. This is inner London on a budget, not suburbia with a garden gate. The flats above the shops and the Victorian terraces behind them house a population younger and more mixed than the London average, with the density of a place that has never had much spare land to spread into.

Getting into town is the easy part. Catford and Catford Bridge stations sit close together and both push you into the rail network without much fuss, which is part of why this remains a commuter's suburb despite the budget prices. Schools are a genuinely mixed bag rather than a uniform sell: Rushey Green Primary and Torridon Primary both carry Good ratings, which will matter to anyone with young children, but Conisborough College, the local secondary, was rated Requires Improvement, and that gap between primary and secondary provision is worth sitting with rather than skimming past. Housing here means flats more than houses, overwhelmingly, and the market is freehold-leaning but with a real leasehold minority — so a For Sale board is as likely to mean a converted terrace flat as a whole house. At a median of £538,250, prices actually run below the borough of Lewisham as a whole, a modest discount rather than a bargain, and well below the wider London figure, which is the arithmetic behind why people who work in Zone 1 but can't afford Zone 2 end up here.