Victorian London house with leafy front garden

London garden study

32 boroughs, 3.7 million homes

Where Should Garden Lovers Live in London?

You want to live in London. You also want somewhere to grow tomatoes, train a climbing rose and sit out on a warm summer evening. So where should you look?

It depends a lot on the borough you choose. Move to Bromley and the typical house comes with a garden almost the size of a tennis court. In Westminster, you’ll get about a sixth of that.

Here’s where garden lovers get the most room to grow, the boroughs where you’ll be lucky to fit a pot plant and how your shortlist compares.

The five best boroughs for garden lovers

All five are in outer London, and all five give you a typical house garden bigger than the Great Britain typical. Ranked by the size of the typical house garden:

  1. 1

    Bromley

    If garden size matters more than anything, start your search here. Houses in Bromley have the biggest gardens in London, and once flats are counted, it still has more garden per home than any other borough.

    239.5 m²typical house garden
  2. 2

    Harrow

    The runner-up for garden size, with typical house gardens comfortably above the Great Britain typical of 188.1 m². About 85% of homes here have private outdoor space.

    204.5 m²typical house garden
  3. 3

    Barnet

    Big gardens, if you buy a house. Almost half of Barnet’s homes are flats, so only 80% of homes here have any outdoor space. Pick a house and you’ll get one of the largest gardens in the capital.

    201.8 m²typical house garden
  4. 4

    Havering

    Your best chance of getting a garden at all. 89.7% of homes in Havering have private outdoor space, the highest share in London, and the houses come with generous plots too.

    195.4 m²typical house garden
  5. 5

    Bexley

    A strong all-rounder. 88.5% of homes have outdoor space, second only to Havering, and the typical house garden is still bigger than the national typical.

    189.0 m²typical house garden

What you can expect to get

Numbers on a page are hard to picture, so here’s the typical house garden in every London borough, drawn to the same scale as a tennis court. A doubles court covers 261 m². Bromley’s typical garden would almost fill one, while Westminster’s would cover barely a sixth of it.

Every square is a borough’s typical (median) house garden, drawn to the same scale. Choose a borough below to find it here.

5.9xbigger typical house garden in Bromley than in Westminster
139.6 m²typical house garden across London
1 in 5London homes have no private outdoor space at all
4.4London flats share each outdoor space, the most of any region

The boroughs to think twice about

If a garden is high on your list, these are the hardest places to find one. Ranked from the smallest typical house garden:

  1. 32

    Westminster

    The smallest house gardens in London. Split all its outdoor space between every home and each one gets just 12 m².

    40.8 m²typical house garden
  2. 31

    Kensington and Chelsea

    Tiny gardens on the houses, but there’s a twist. 81.3% of flats here have outdoor space, the highest share in London.

    54.0 m²typical house garden
  3. 30

    Tower Hamlets

    Small gardens and the lowest chance of having one. Only 60.3% of homes in Tower Hamlets have any private outdoor space.

    54.6 m²typical house garden
  4. 29

    Hammersmith and Fulham

    Most homes have some outdoor space (81%), but the typical house garden is less than a quarter of Bromley’s.

    55.8 m²typical house garden
  5. 28

    Islington

    Only 70.7% of homes have outdoor space, and 86% of homes here are flats.

    63.2 m²typical house garden

Set on central London? A flat with its own outdoor space may be easier to find than a house with a decent garden. In Kensington and Chelsea, Haringey and Hammersmith and Fulham, more than three in four flats have some outdoor space.

Aerial view of North London residential streets

Check the boroughs on your shortlist

Garden size is only part of the picture. A borough full of flats can have big gardens on its houses but little outdoor space overall. Switch between the three measures to see how the boroughs you’re considering compare.

    See the full data table

    Swipe sideways to see every column.

    The City of London is left out of the ranking because it has very few homes. Only 7.2% of them have private outdoor space.

    Worth knowing before you move

    Richmond isn’t the obvious choice

    Richmond upon Thames is famous for its parks, but its typical house garden is 137.5 m², 14th in London. Croydon, Brent and Enfield all beat it.

    Croydon hides London’s biggest gardens

    One Croydon neighbourhood has a typical house garden of 678.7 m², bigger than 99% of neighbourhoods in Great Britain.

    Buying a flat? Expect to share

    Where London flats have outdoor space, it’s shared between 4.4 flats on average, more than anywhere else in the country.

    London is the hardest place to get a garden

    79.3% of London homes have private outdoor space, the lowest of any region in Great Britain. In the North East it’s 93.1%.

    A bigger garden isn’t always a better one. Some of the best gardens I’ve worked on are small spaces planted densely, where every square metre gives something back through the year. If you’re moving for the garden, look at the light, the soil and how the space makes you feel when you step into it. Size comes a long way after that.

    Mark Wright, founder of Umber Garden Design

    How was the data sourced?

    All figures come from the ONS dataset Access to gardens and public green space in Great Britain. It’s based on Ordnance Survey AddressBase Plus (April 2020) and covers 28,818,909 residential addresses, 3.7 million of them in London. “Garden” refers to private outdoor space as measured by Ordnance Survey.

    Typical house garden is the median private outdoor space for houses in each borough. Chance of a garden is the share of all homes, houses and flats, with private outdoor space. Garden per home is a borough’s total private outdoor space divided by all of its homes. The City of London is excluded from the ranking.

    This analysis was produced by Umber Garden Design. If you cite these figures, please link to this page as the source.

    Source: Umber Garden Design analysis of Ordnance Survey data published by the ONS

    Whatever the size, the planting makes the garden

    Umber Garden Design is a garden design and build studio in Leamington Spa, led by founder Mark Wright. We design and build gardens that are planted to change through the seasons and get better with age. If you’re planning a garden in Warwickshire or the Cotswolds, we’d love to hear from you.

    See our approach to garden design in Warwickshire, or get in touch to talk about your space.

    Talk to us

    Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2020 OS 100019153. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.