Tufnell Park

Rows of Victorian terraces carved into flats define the streets here, with the odd stucco front and a high street that runs more to coffee and takeaway boxes than anything glossy. It reads as young-professional London — the median age sits at 35, well below the national average — and the density of the place, over five times the London average, tells you these are shared buildings and shared walls rather than family houses with gardens.

The commute is the area's quiet strength even though the transport grade only lands at a middling C+: there's a single rail station serving the area alongside a good spread of bus stops, enough to get most people into central London without much fuss. Schools carry more weight than the transport score suggests — Yerbury Primary School holds an Outstanding rating, and Hungerford School is rated Good, which is a reasonable hand for a place this size given only two schools are formally counted in the immediate area stats. Housing, though, is where the story turns: nearly nine in ten sales here are flats, almost all leasehold, and a typical flat trades for £480,000 against a national median of £215,000 for the same property type — this is inner-London pricing sitting inside a borough, Islington, where Tufnell Park actually looks like the affordable corner, running about 10% below the borough's own median. Renting isn't cheap either, with typical rents nearly three times the national figure, which is the real trade-off against those Outstanding-school and station credentials.