London is a complicated place with a huge number of areas to choose from. At Rentonomy we split London into over 200 communities and our job is to find the best one for you. Simply tell us a few things about yourself and our unique area matching algorithm will do the rest. Our free service will instantly match you to your ideal areas and if you want to know more, a full comprehensive report is available for purchase and instant download. Read more
London is a patchwork quilt of villages that were absorbed into the city as it expanded organically over the course of the last few centuries. Each of these villages has a unique character and community within it. Some areas are full of super rich people and some are for the rest of us but there is much more to finding your best area to live London than simply how rich residents are.
The question "where should I live in London?" is asked countless times every year by new comers, students, graduates and long time residents of the capital. It can be a very difficult to answer, particularly for those new to the city or indeed the country. Usually people who don’t know London that well move to either the most famous places (which is why areas next to Hyde Park are so expensive!) or places where their friends live. This tried and tested approach is fine but it might mean that people aren’t living in the area they’d most enjoy.
Identifying the best place to live in London always involves a compromise of some sort. The aim of our 'Where should I live' tool is to help quantify and balance what is important to you and then present you with the areas which best fit your needs overall.
How to find the best place to live in London
The model ranks each London area according to a set of measures and then weights them according to how important you think that measure is. For example, if you tell us that you are from Canada we will rank every area of London according to the number of resident Canadians. Then we ask you how important it is to live near your fellow countrymen. If this is really important to you, then London areas with lots of Canadians will feature prominently in the overall score. We repeat this process for all the things we ask you and give each area a combined weighted score.
Having done lots of ordering, we then do some filtering. We ask you if you want to live north or south or in a certain tube zone and cut out any unwanted areas. We do this because some of you may already know a little bit about where you want to live and we want to take this into consideration.
What doesn’t the 'where should I live in London' tool do?
We use your income range to guide you to areas that have lots of people with a similar income to you; we believe this acts as an 'indication' of relative affordability, in that others earning a similar income are able to live in those areas. However, we must stress that our tool does not perform a detailed affordability analysis based on your personal financial circumstances and desired property type.
We totally understand that the most important factor in choosing your home to rent is almost certainly your budget. If you decide you want to spend 40% of your income on rent so have, say £1,000 per month to spend on a 2-bedroom flat there are certain parts of London where that is almost impossible (click here to find out where you can live).
However, if you don’t like any of these areas where you can find a 2 bed flat for £1,000 per month you might have to think about living in a 1 bed or maybe getting a flat mate. These sorts of considerations are obviously crucial but we don’t ‘go there’ in our model. Our job is to direct you to the best area of London for you and then it’s over to you to explore the market.
