A well-known building society has published its annual press release claiming it knows what the most expensive streets in England are. Given that most properties don't change hands very often so nobody knows precisely what they're worth, a lot of best guess modelling must have been required. But let's treat the list as truth and go visit some of the country's most expensive streets, the first five of which are all within quarter of a mile of Hyde Park or Holland Park.
It doesn't look table-topping. The houses are big and it looks posh, but Phillimore Gardens is no exclusive enclave and nothing obviously marks out this street from its neighbours. One big plus is that the gardens on the western side look out over Holland Park, although only the bit that's mostly a sports pitch, and the houses numbered below 25 actually look out onto the Design Museum instead. It gains a little panache for being on a hill, and loses some for its oddly inconsistent architecture. Most of the houses are massive Georgian piles nudging four storeys tall so there's plenty of room for a billiard room if you want one. The majority are bedecked in white stucco, some have gorgeous tiled steps and one has a Christmas tree in the window which exceeds any Hallmark movie. Very few appear to be subdivided into flats, which may be what helps to keep the average price up. But down at the lower end numbers 1 to 5 are merely minor postwar infill, and one or two of the other houses feel like if they were elsewhere in the country they'd probably only contain a doctor's surgery or be sliced into a dozen student rooms.
One way you can tell Phillimore Gardens is wealthy is that six of the 48 houses are currently boarded up while their owners enact major internal transformation. A team of scaffolders from Watford were piling into number 47, the neighbouring property had appointed traffic marshals to oversee deliveries and the ambience in the centre of the street suffered somewhat from numbers 23, 24 and 25 being simultaneously hoardinged. At the top of the street you're only fifty paces from a Dog Toilet, or the entrance to Holland Park if you prefer. And at the bottom, oddly, the houses fade out to be replaced a Bone Daddies ramen restaurant and the delights of Cafe Phillies, should you desire a sprinkly drink on its pavement terrace. If nothing else Phillimore Gardens is really convenient for the Nando's and the Rymans on Kensington High Street, although that only explains a small proportion of their inflated house prices. Meanwhile on the bench outside the Post Office on the corner I spotted a headscarfed women trying to sell passers-by a copy of the Big Issue, and a tiny fraction of number 39's kitchen refurbishment budget would have done her nicely.
Oh come on Well Known Building Society, that's not a street, that's a square in Mayfair where the American embassy used to be. That iconic building is currently being transformed into an uber-luxury hotel, and a couple of slightly lesser hotels exist on the northern and southern flanks. But if you look around the rest of the square it is very much still a residential address with a number of ostentatious doors spaced out amid the more austere brickwork. Some have individual buttons, but others are just anonymous portals watched over by discreet security cameras with who knows what behind. I'd like to imagine a throwback lobby leading to one of those rickety elevators in a trellised shaft, but given the astronomical service charges it's undoubtedly a lot swisher than that. Indeed over at the newly refurbished 1Grosvenor Square one of the flats sold in March for £24,500,000 and another in April for £26,250,000, because a team of thirty concierges, a swimming pool and a ballet room don't come cheap, and that's how the average house price here has hit phenomenal heights.
This is only a short walk away from Phillimore Gardens, literally on the other side of Holland Park and with its own convenient adjacent Dog Toilet. But Ilchester Place is part of a completely different estate and has a completely different aesthetic, indeed the set-up is considerably more coherent all round. It's lined by 24 Neo-Georgian houses, twelve on each side, in a space where an East End slum builder would easily have been able to cram 100. All are quite similar without being utterly identical, generally three storeys high plus steps down into the most pristine of basements. Everyone has steps up to their front door, most have gone big on wreaths this Christmas and so many of the front gardens had similar flowers I assumed the same landscape gardener had been payrolled. With its 1920s architecture it could be easily be somewhere in Hampstead or Highgate but instead it's just a short walk to the station at Kensington Olympia (or more likely a taxi direct because why slum it?). For a top class street it's actually quite pleasant and not too snobby, with none of the security gates you see in front of many jumped-up suburban fortresses.
Again you can tell the owners are rich because three of the houses are boarded up pending internal upgrade. Each hoarding is labelled prominently with the name of the architects doing the work, and number 23 even has a newsletter out front to inform neighbours when a crane might be visiting. I understand several houses only look uniform from the front because everything behind the facade was replaced the last time the builders came in. We are in fact in prime 'basement wars' territory, as repeatedly reported by the Evening Standard, indeed Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page are often reported to be battling it out in the street nextdoor. Three separate vans were delivering parcels during my visit, plus Ocado (not Fortnum and Mason) had turned up to offload the Christmas feast for one of the houses in the high twenties. I see Ilchester Place officially held the title of the UK's most expensive street in 2019 and has been marginally leapfrogged since rather than fading away. But again you'd never guess from standing here that this brief street was somehow the luxury bolthole of choice for so many deep-pocketed homeowners.
You're a bit more likely to know this one because it connects to Hyde Park Corner - a short curving link to the diplomatic oasis of Belgravia Square. At the top end are megaprojects like the Lanesborough Hotel and 1 Knightsbridge, which I assume don't count towards Grosvenor Crescent's average house price. What must count are the fifteen stucco mansions which follow the outside of the bend and the two, just two, detached beauties across the road. Also numbers 1 and 16 are embassies, those of the UAE and Belgium respectively, and they can't count either. We're on the Grosvenor Estate here, Thomas Cubitt's late Georgian architectural playground, and much more the kind of place where you'd expect a table-topping street to be. This is a street where the house numbers are painted onto the pillars out front, where even stepping up to the porch inspires a feeling of unworthiness and where the landlord ensures that five neighbouring houses all have identical ornamental shrubs on their first floor balcony.
And yet this isn't an especially nice place to be, indeed nothing about Grosvenor Crescent marked it out as a pleasant place to live. The street is busy with two-way traffic because with Hyde Park Corner at one end of course it is. Also anywhere with money invariably has the builders in and at the moment they're dismantling multi-storey scaffolding outside the whole of numbers 5 to 10. I don't think they wanted me walking past their tins of Dulux, stacks of planks and cans of Red Bull, so they pulled out a plastic barrier behind me and the next family had to step out into the road across a pile of discarded plywood. The pavement is also restricted at the top end of the road to facilitate the construction of a luxury hotel topped off with money-spinning penthouses, and here the exterior compound was rammed with a ridiculous number of workmen taking a break for a snack or a phone-fiddle. Residents can't be paying for the delightful ambience, only the prestige of a Belgravia slot, so I guess it must look a lot more appealing behind those blank facades.
It's obscene really isn't it? These are averages for heaven's sake, not top prices, and £14m would be enough to buy entire estates elsewhere in the country. Best not stop to think how far down the list your humble street might come, assuming you're lucky enough to own the house you live in, because all London property is property porn these days.
