Anne Ashworth
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The most expensive streets in Britain rarely go by such a name. They are more likely to be called avenues, drives, granges, groves, roads, rises, vales and walks. But the streets that contain the most expensive properties are gardens. Or, best of all, squares.
Kensington Square (average price £5,534,4800) and Chelsea Square (£5,098,047), in London, top a poll of the 20 most expensive streets in England and Wales. None of the multi-millionaires’ rows listed is a street. The poll, prepared by Mouseprice.com, a property data website, is based on Land Registry sale price statistics, up-dated with current estate agents’ particulars.
Blue plaques proliferate in Kensington Square, which was home to, among others, Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter. Marc Roget, of Roget’s Thesaurus, went to a school on the site of 42 Kensington Square. This painstakingly restored Georgian house is now on the market for £6,950,000.
Portnall Rise in Virginia Water, one of Surrey’s most salubrious locations, takes third place in the poll with an average price of £3,446,220. The attraction of this street is not its artistic and historical connections, although lovers of Art Deco architecture would be in raptures: it is part of the lush and verdant 1,750acre Wentworth Estate, famous for its golf club.
Ravenscroft Road, in Weybridge, an equally moneyed part of Surrey, and Park Avenue South, in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, are numbers four and five in the Mouseprice. com poll. Their average prices are £3,233,140 and £1,881,283 respectively.
The appeal of Park Avenue South lies not only in its luxurious detached properties, but also in Harpenden’s convenient location: close to the M25 and Luton airport.
Greg McCann, of Ashton, the local estate agents, describes Park Avenue South: “There are lovely big gardens and a wide range of homes, some of them backing on to open farmland. Yet it is just five minutes from the town centre.”
Whitebarn Road (average price £1,855,880), in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, and close to Manchester, offers the same combination of homes with every imaginable domestic comfort, seclusion and commuting convenience.
But the glamour of its footballing residents has rubbed off on the village; its name is nowadays inextricably linked with the free-spending, spraytanned WAGs.
Nearby Hale has acquired something of the same bling reputation; Hill Top, its most sought-after street, has an average price of £1,849,392, putting it at number seven in the poll.
The drably named Western Avenue (£1,520,032) and Mornish Road (£1,434,300) occupy ninth and tenth places. But these are smart streets in Branksome Park, a tree-lined suburb of Poole, on the hill above the exclusive Sandbanks.
A recently built home in Branksome Park — more popular with successful entrepreneurs than sportsmen — featured a £33,000 sarcophagus-shaped bath, which gives some idea of the standard of luxury in homes in the area. The top streets in Wales are in the Cardiff suburbs and have average prices below £1 million. Cefn Coed Road (£698,467) features large detached homes built in the 1930s on large plots 15 minutes from the city centre.
Chris Saye, of Kelvin Francis, the local estate agent, said: “It is the equivalent of Surrey in the style of property and desirability.”
The average price in Twyn-cyn may be only £677,767, but it is still known as Cardiff’s millionaires’ row.
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