House prices in the UK soared to record highs in 2022 – reaching £293,000 on average in September – and have only just begun cooling off.
Coupled with the crippling effects of the cost-of-living crisis, many had to shelve their homeowning dreams last year, with sales falling 32 percent in England.
New data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has now revealed just how wide the property value gulf between neighbourhoods has stretched.
Statisticians have divided Britain into 7,201 community-sized chunks called Middle-layer Super Output Areas, typically home to around 8,000 people.
In the cheapest of these – in the North Sea coastal village of Horden, County Durham – the median price paid for a home was just £60,000. In one corner of central London, this figure is almost 70 times higher.
Bricks and mortar are more expensive in the capital than anywhere else in the UK, at £533,687 on average over the year to April 2023.
In some neighbourhoods, however, potential buyers have to fork out a far greater sum. In Knightsbridge, Belgravia & Hyde Park, this came to £4,095,500 last year – the heftiest bill in the country.
Encompassing parts of the affluent London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster, the area is lined with terraced stucco townhouses, international embassies and five-star hotels, not to mention luxury retailers such as Harrods.
Belgravia alone was formerly home to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Halifax, Sir Michael Caine, Nigella Lawson, Jose Mourinho and Sean Connery to name just a few.
All of the top ten most expensive neighbourhoods in the UK were, in fact, in London. In second place came Kensington Abingdon – just south of Holland Park – where houses went for £2,250,000 on average last year.
This was followed by Marylebone & Park Lane in Westminster (£2,050,000), Queen’s Gate on the north side of Hyde Park (£2,030,000) and Hans Town to its south (£1,937,500).
The first non-London area is in 27th place – Gerrards Cross in south Buckinghamshire – where the median property price was still a hefty £1,300,000. In total, 63 MSOAs recorded a figure of £1million or above.
