Mayfair

Mayfair's streets are lined with stucco-fronted townhouses and discreet gallery frontages, the kind of place where a shopfront might hold a private members' club as easily as a jeweller. You don't stumble across Mayfair as a passer-through; you're either here for the address or you're not. The buildings are Georgian in bone structure, immaculately kept, and the people on the pavement at any hour look like they've somewhere specific to be.

Bond Street Station puts you within the tunnel network for Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus both, which for an area with just a single official transport stop on the books is a reminder that Mayfair doesn't need much street-level infrastructure when the Underground is this dense beneath it — hence a transport grade that reads C+ despite the postcode's cachet, a genuine daily friction rather than a rounding error. On schools it's a different story: the grade sits at A, and while St George's Hanover Square CofE Primary is rated Good rather than Outstanding, the presence of London Park School Mayfair signals that families who stay here tend to go independent. The median age of 44.5, older than both the regional and national norms, tells you this isn't a young professional's first-flat suburb — it's a place people arrive at once they've already made their money.

That reading holds in the property market too. Flats dominate absolutely, leasehold is the default tenure by a wide margin, and freehold sits at under a fifth of sales — a For Sale board here is almost never selling you the ground beneath your feet. A median sale price of £925,000 puts Mayfair at the 95th percentile nationally, and even against Westminster — hardly an affordable borough itself — it's running 34% higher. Green space is thin on paper, just a few pockets totalling under three hectares, but what's there is used hard: expect a walk through Berkeley Square or similar pocket gardens to be the extent of the outdoor ritual, folded around lunch at one of the area's members' dining rooms or a wander through the gallery streets off Cork Street. The nightlife grade is the highest on the sheet, A+, and it shows — this is a place built around evenings out, not around a high street of everyday shops.