u/PreviousSceneDolly

We’d love some recommendations for where to buy in London to raise a family. We have a budget of around £1.3-1.5m and are looking for a spacious 3+ bedroom house, ideally Victorian or Edwardian, with a garden.

One slightly unusual requirement is that we’re planning on having an intergenerational home, with my parents-in-law living on the ground floor while my partner and I have the upper floors. So a house with a sensible layout and good-sized rooms is particularly important to us.

Our other priorities are:

• Good, accessible transport. My partner may work in East London in the future, although hopefully won’t be commuting every day, and I work remotely.
• Being close to a park, green space or river
• Good state schools
• A strong sense of community and somewhere that feels family-friendly
• Nice independent shops, cafés, markets etc. would be a bonus
• We’re an East Asian+British interracial couple, so we’d also really value somewhere diverse and welcoming. Sadly, this isn't something we can take for granted everywhere in the UK.
• We still want to feel connected to London rather than feeling like we’ve moved completely out of the city.

The areas we’ve particularly liked so far are Crouch End, Muswell Hill, Chiswick and Ealing, but we’re finding that our budget is a bit stretched for the sort of house we’d ideally want there.

We’re therefore starting to wonder whether we need to look a little further out, or perhaps at areas that are less buzzy/less fashionable but offer much more house for the money.

We’ve come to the realisation that we might be looking for a bit of a unicorn and are feeling quite lost about where to focus our search!

If you had £1.3-1.5m and these were your priorities, where would you look? Particularly interested in areas that might not immediately be on our radar.

Thanks!

We’d love some recommendations for where to buy in London to raise a family. We have a budget of around £1.3-1.5m and are looking for a spacious 3+ bedroom house, ideally Victorian or Edwardian, with a garden.

One slightly unusual requirement is that we’re planning on having an intergenerational home, with my parents-in-law living on the ground floor while my partner and I have the upper floors. So a house with a sensible layout and good-sized rooms is particularly important to us.

Our other priorities are:

• Good, accessible transport. My partner may work in East London in the future, although hopefully won’t be commuting every day, and I work remotely.
• Being close to a park, green space or river
• Good state schools
• A strong sense of community and somewhere that feels family-friendly
• Nice independent shops, cafés, markets etc. would be a bonus
• We’re an East Asian+British interracial couple, so we’d also really value somewhere diverse and welcoming. Sadly, this isn't something we can take for granted everywhere in the UK.
• We still want to feel connected to London rather than feeling like we’ve moved completely out of the city.

The areas we’ve particularly liked so far are Crouch End, Muswell Hill, Chiswick and Ealing, but we’re finding that our budget is a bit stretched for the sort of house we’d ideally want there.

We’re therefore starting to wonder whether we need to look a little further out, or perhaps at areas that are less buzzy/less fashionable but offer much more house for the money.

We’ve come to the realisation that we might be looking for a bit of a unicorn and are feeling quite lost about where to focus our search!

If you had £1.3-1.5m and these were your priorities, where would you look? Particularly interested in areas that might not immediately be on our radar.

Thanks!