01Neighbourhoods
Know the street
before the house.
Ten parts of London, each with its own pace and architecture. Select a neighbourhood on the map or in the list, then read the full guide.
Steep lanes, brick gables and the Heath at the end of the road.
Hampstead is a village that happens to be in London. The streets bend to follow old contours, houses sit at angles to one another, and almost every view ends in trees. Victorian villas share the hill with interwar flats and a few careful modern interventions.
Georgian regularity, a proper high street and Regent’s Park close by.
Marylebone was laid out in the eighteenth century and still reads as a plan: squares, mews behind the terraces, a high street that serves the people who live on it. The brick is a calm yellow-grey and the proportions do a lot of the work.
A river village of garden walls, painters’ studios and tall brick terraces.
Chelsea keeps its scale. Along the Embankment and in the lanes behind it, houses are three or four storeys, many with walled gardens that you would never guess from the street. Artists’ studios with north lights still punctuate the terraces.
Stucco crescents, communal gardens and a market with a long memory.
The Ladbroke estate was planned around shared gardens, and that idea still defines the best streets: stucco terraces facing a private green that belongs to everyone on the crescent. The pastel colours are the postcard; the gardens are the substance.
Georgian squares, canal towpaths and warehouses given a second life.
Islington is two places at once. Around Canonbury and Barnsbury sit calm Georgian squares; along the Regent’s Canal, brick warehouses and foundries have become loft homes with tall steel windows and original structure left visible.
Cubitt’s white stucco, mews behind the squares.
Belgravia was built as a single idea in the nineteenth century: grand stucco terraces facing garden squares, with mews lanes behind for the stables and staff. Those mews are now among the most characterful homes in the centre.
A hilltop village with woodland on three sides.
Highgate sits on the northern ridge with the Heath on one side and Waterlow Park on another. The High Street is village-scaled, and the roads around it hold large Victorian and Edwardian houses behind mature hedges.
Stucco terraces towards Primrose Hill, canal-side energy to the south.
Away from the market crowds, the residential streets around Camden Square and towards Primrose Hill are composed and calm. Terraces of three and four storeys give proper family houses with rear gardens.
Large villas, leafy streets and a park with a wild side.
Holland Park mixes grand Victorian villas with mansion blocks and a number of notable twentieth-century houses. Streets are wide and tree-lined, and the park itself has woodland, formal gardens and a Japanese garden.
Garden squares, university buildings and a great museum.
Bloomsbury is organised around its squares, each one a green room with Georgian terraces on four sides. Much of the area belongs to institutions, which keeps it intellectual, walkable and surprisingly quiet.
Selected: Hampstead — 1 concept residence in the collection.