London price per square metre: where value still exists

London’s median sale price is £530,000 — a number that tells you almost nothing, because it depends entirely on what happened to sell. Divide by floor area instead and the capital resolves into something you can navigate: a median of £6,593/m² across 57,644 registered sales (12 months), against £3,385/m² for England and Wales as a whole. London costs almost exactly twice as much per square metre as the country it sits in.

Within that, the spread is enormous. Across the 244 London districts with enough matched sales to publish a median, the figure runs from about £4,430/m² to £25,397/m². Only 16 of those 244 districts come in under £5,000/m². Forty-seven are over £10,000/m². The median London district sits at £6,817/m².

The cheapest end: outer east and south-east

Every district below £5,000/m² is on the outer edge, and nearly all of them are east or south-east. Median price per m² over 12 months of registered sales:

• DA8, Northumberland Heath — £4,430/m² (227 sales)
• IG11, Barking — £4,679/m² (237 sales)
• DA17, Belvedere — £4,711/m² (146 sales)
• CR7, Thornton Heath — £4,737/m² (228 sales)
• SE28, Thamesmead — £4,844/m² (160 sales)
• RM10, Dagenham — £4,926/m² (198 sales)
• E6, East Ham — £5,095/m² (231 sales)

The step up from there is gradual rather than sudden: SE18, Plumstead at £5,439/m² (426 sales), SE9, Eltham at £5,497/m² (447 sales), BR1, Sundridge in Bromley at £5,535/m² (460 sales), E16, Canning Town at £5,952/m² (322 sales) and E15, Stratford at £6,111/m² (256 sales). Eighty-four of the 244 districts are still under £6,000/m², so “cheap per square metre” covers a much larger share of London than the coverage of the market suggests.

Cheap is not the same as value

Cheap per square metre only becomes interesting when the number has also been going somewhere. Comparing the average of the first three quarters of the last ten years with the average of the three most recent complete quarters — a deliberately dull method, because single quarters are noisy — the outer districts have done the work:

• RM10, Dagenham — median £/m² up 29.3% over ten years
• E17, Walthamstow — up 28.3%
• DA8, Northumberland Heath — up 24.3%
• SE15, Peckham — up 22.2%
• SE18, Plumstead — up 21.0%
• DA17, Belvedere — up 20.8%
• SE9, Eltham — up 20.2%

Set against that, the median London district has risen just 11.0% in ten years (the median of 226 London districts with a full decade of matched sales). England and Wales as a whole managed 36.3% on the same measure, across 2,161 districts. London’s decade was flat in per-square-metre terms; the growth happened in a ring around its edge.

Prime London has gone backwards

The most expensive districts in the country have lost ground per square metre over the same ten years:

• SW7, South Kensington — £15,017/m² today, down 19.3% over ten years
• SW3, Chelsea — £16,017/m², down 13.8%
• W8, Kensington — £15,497/m², down 9.9%
• NW3, Hampstead — £11,429/m², down 2.4%
• W11, Notting Hill — £14,647/m², up 1.9%

The very top of the market is thin enough that its figures need care. W1K, Mayfair has the highest median in the dataset at £25,397/m², but that rests on 47 sales over a 24-month window and is flagged low confidence for exactly that reason. Below prime, the newer river districts have drifted too: E14, Isle of Dogs is down 8.5% per m² over ten years, E1W, Wapping down 5.0% and TW8, Brentford down 6.3% — areas where a decade of new supply has been resold into the same market.

The variation inside a district is bigger than you think

A district median hides a lot. Postcode sectors within a single outward code routinely differ by a third or more:

• SE15, Peckham — SE15 1 at £6,199/m² against SE15 4 at £8,994/m², a 45% gap
• SW11, Battersea — SW11 3 at £7,962/m² against SW11 6 at £10,383/m²
• SW19, Wimbledon — SW19 6 at £6,758/m² against SW19 8 at £8,708/m²

If you are choosing between two streets rather than two boroughs, go down to sector level. Each district page lists its sectors with their own medians and sale counts.

The middle of the market

Between the outer ring and prime sits the bulk of London’s housing: SE13, Hither Green at £6,500/m² (387 sales), E14, Isle of Dogs at £6,821/m² (602 sales), SE15, Peckham at £7,624/m² (419 sales), E17, Walthamstow at £7,805/m² (827 sales), SW17, Tooting at £7,917/m² (621 sales), SW19, Wimbledon at £8,000/m² (766 sales), SE22, East Dulwich at £8,750/m² (334 sales) and SW11, Battersea at £9,312/m² (796 sales). All counts are 12 months of registered sales.

On the ten-year measure this middle band has been steady rather than exciting: SE22 up 18.6%, SW19 up 7.3%, SE13 up 6.0%, SW17 up 5.8% and SW11 up 5.6%. A per-square-metre view is unusually unkind to the parts of London people talk about most.

How to read these numbers honestly

Three caveats belong with every figure above. First, these are medians of past registered sales, not statements about any individual home. Second, a district median partly reflects what sold: a quarter heavy on large houses reads higher than a quarter heavy on studio flats, and the medians here are not adjusted for that mix. Third, the most recent quarter is always incomplete — Land Registry registrations lag completed sales by roughly two to eight weeks — which is why the ten-year figures above stop at the last complete quarter and average three quarters at each end.

Sources

• Sold prices, sale counts and quarterly history: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, full-market (category A) residential sales, dataset anchored 30 Jun 2026. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Floor areas: Energy Performance of Buildings Register (England and Wales), matched to sales by address. Address data © Royal Mail.
• Region and district geography: ONS Postcode Directory. Contains ONS and OS data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Growth method, filters, confidence levels and the incomplete-quarter rule: see the RealScout methodology page.