It has long been recognised that house prices in London are significantly higher than in the rest of the UK. But the extent to which houses in certain parts of the capital cost more than anywhere else has been highlighted by the results of a survey just published by Lloyd’s Bank.
There are 15 streets in the UK where the average house price in the period from 2010 to 2015 has been more than £5m. All of them are in London, and nine of them (including four of the top five) are in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Top of the list is Victoria Road, where the average house price is now reckoned to be £8,006,000. Victoria Road is close to Kensington Palace, which is the London home of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It consists of 64 properties, the oldest of which go back to the middle of the nineteenth century. One six-bedroomed house on the road sold for £13m in July 2014; for those wishing to buy now, there is a five-bedroomed apartment currently for sale for £7.95m.
Of the London properties in the top 15 which are not in Kensington and Chelsea, Eaton Square in Westminster is not too far away, where the average price is £6,727,000. Further out are, to the south, Parkside in Merton (£6,355,000) and to the north, West Heath Road in the Borough of Barnet. Here, houses with an unobstructed view of Hampstead Heath on the opposite side of the road are worth in the region of £5.2m.
You have to look to twentieth place on the list before you find a street outside London. Two streets in each of the Surrey towns of Leatherhead and Cobham come in between £3m and £3.7m. A little further down come streets in popular commuter destinations into London, such as Virginia Water, Maidenhead, Ascot and even Oxford.
To find a street not in London or the South East of England you have to go down to 32nd place, where Sandbanks Road in Poole in the county of Dorset lies, with an average property price of just under £2.5m. Indeed, Poole – which has three streets on the list – is the only place named in the Top 50 which is not in the South East of England (its location on the south coast is in the South West).
As you travel further away from London and the South East, prices of all properties often fall significantly. In East Anglia, for example, to the north east of London, only the city of Cambridge has notably expensive streets, the highest having an average price of just over £1.85m. In the north of England, around Manchester, the most expensive areas tend to be less connected with business than with football: prices of £1,662,000 in Macclesfield and £1,330,000 in Wilmslow say a lot about the amount of money paid to today’s top players in the Barclays Premier League.
It is curious to note that no streets in Wales top the £1m average mark. The most expensive road in the Principality, Druidstone Road in Cardiff, is valued at an average of £793,000 per property. Another significant difference from London, too, is that whereas in the capital the most expensive streets are located close to the centre, in the provinces a large price tag will buy you not only a larger property but also more green space around it. Or, in the case of Poole, a sea view and access to an exclusive yacht club.
