North Greenwich

The skyline here is glass and steel rather than terraces — tower blocks of flats clustered round the O2, cranes still visible on the Peninsula where new blocks keep going up. It reads as a place built in the last twenty years rather than one that grew organically, and the people you see reflect that: young, transient, mostly renting or newly bought, few of them raising teenagers here yet. The median age of 31 tells you this is a first-flat-in-London crowd, not a settled-family postcode.

Getting around is the area's strongest card. North Greenwich Underground Station and IFS Cloud Greenwich Peninsula give you two rail options within the same patch, backed up by a dense scattering of bus stops — more than most London suburbs get. That connectivity is why flats dominate so completely: of the recent sales here, the overwhelming majority were flats, nearly all leasehold, with houses a rare sight. A "For Sale" board here is almost always on a leasehold flat in a newish block, not a Victorian terrace with a garden. Schooling is thinner on the ground — only a handful of schools serve the immediate area, including Millennium Primary School and Christ Church Church of England Primary School, alongside Ravensbourne and the University of Greenwich for higher education, so this isn't yet a place with the dense primary-school choice you'd find in an established residential suburb.

Green space is modest for inner London — a scattering of small parks rather than one big open expanse — but the Thames path and the O2's orbit of bars and restaurants give the area its social centre of gravity, and the sheer density of people packed into a small footprint (population density here runs well above the London average) means the pavements and riverside never feel empty. This shows up starkly in the area's grades: nightlife and housing both score at the very top of the scale, connectivity and schools sit comfortably above the national average, but safety and health lag behind — a gap worth sitting with rather than skating over. Violence and anti-social behaviour together account for close to half of recorded crime, and the crime rate here runs more than double the Greenwich borough average, even though house prices sit only modestly above it. That's the area's quiet contradiction: a place graded A for housing and A+ for nightlife, but C+ for safety, which suggests the good times and the good flats coexist with a rougher edge than the shiny towers first suggest.