Waltham Forest

Terraced streets dominate here, brick bay-fronted rows running off a high street that mixes Turkish grills, Caribbean bakeries and the odd craft coffee counter — the look of a place that's been quietly filling up with people priced out of Hackney rather than one built for a single type of resident. You'll see prams and delivery cyclists on the same pavement, market stalls, and a fair number of period conversions with the scaffolding still up.

Getting around is the strong suit: Walthamstow Central gives you Underground and rail options in one building, Highams Park adds another line out, and across the borough there are a dozen rail stations feeding into 573 transport stops in total — this is a place built around the commute, not against it. Schools are a genuinely mixed picture rather than a uniform story: Selwyn Primary carries an Outstanding rating, Walthamstow Academy posts a solidly positive progress score, but South Chingford Foundation School's is sharply negative, and the borough-wide Ofsted average sits close to the national norm rather than above it — so which street, and which catchment, matters more than the borough label. Housing follows the same terraced, freehold pattern the streets suggest: three-quarters of recent sales were houses rather than flats, freehold outnumbers leasehold, and a median price around £525,000 sits just under what the wider borough itself commands — cheaper than its own patch, if only slightly.