Forum Topic

The ten best high streets??

The estate agents Hamptons International have tried to identify the places with the buzziest and most chain-free high streets. It crunched the data for Britain’s small and medium-sized towns and identified those with (a) the most independent shops and (b) house price growth of over 30 per cent since the 2007 peak, the latter indicating healthy levels of demand to live there; the ten best on these measures are shown in the figure below.
Putney would, presumably, qualify as a place with healthy demand for accommodation, but would fall down on the lack of independent shops in the High Street. But you hardly need a big data crunching exercise to find this out, surely?

Richard Carter ● 2724d4 Comments

I should have added, this exercise was reported in the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/uk/do-live-near-one-britains-best-10-high-streets/

Richard Carter ● 2724d

I think Barnes was rated the best highstreet by some survey last year.  Not in this list - I wonder if it is not considered a town, or whether house price growth ruled it out.

Alan Sherman ● 2724d

You've probably identified one of the limitations of this study, since it's confined to places with a population of between 10,000 and 27,000. I'm not sure what the population of Barnes is, but it would anyway count as a suburb, I suppose: another limitation with this survey.

Richard Carter ● 2724d

Barnes has a pretty, windy High St and also the road up to the Wetlands, with the pond and surrounds looking so lovely.  Also many affluent and famous residents who, dare I say, might have a few bob.  Hence lovely cheese shop and so on.Putney High St is a narrow channel with fairly high buildings on either side, used by traffic going South to the A3 and North from Surrey up to Central London.  As much as we try, it is not going to be attractive unless we have plaza(s) and open spaces opening out from the High St.

Bunny Payne ● 2724d