Putney

Putney's high street runs from mansion blocks down toward the river, and the mix on the pavements tells you most of what you need to know: gym bags, dog leads, buggies, and a fair few people walking fast with a phone in hand. It reads as a place for people who've done reasonably well and want London without quite so much of London's edge — young professionals mostly, with families starting to arrive once the pushchair years begin.

The commute is the spine of the place. Putney Station puts you on a direct run into the centre, which is what draws the 30-somethings who work in town but want a garden square or a river view at the weekend — median age here is 36.1, notably younger than the national figure, and that skews the whole feel of the area toward people mid-career rather than settled for retirement. Schools follow a similar pattern of solid rather than spectacular: the local primaries — Granard, Hotham, All Saints', St Mary's — mostly carry Good ratings, and Ark Putney Academy covers secondary with an Ofsted Good and a progress score that sits right around the national average. If you want outstanding on paper you may have to look outside the immediate area, but "consistently good" is not a bad foundation to build a family life on. Housing, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly a leasehold flat market — 133 of the 165 recent sales were flats, against a small handful of houses — so what you're buying here is more often a share of a converted mansion block than a freehold terrace, and the price reflects it: a median around £650,000 sits close to the top decile nationally, though it's actually a shade cheaper than the Wandsworth borough average, which tells you Putney is one of the more accessible corners of a expensive borough rather than the priciest.