About this site
About Where in London
This site helps people work out which part of a city actually suits them — by commute, by rent, and by what they want their week to look like — instead of guessing from property listings alone. It started as Where in London, covering the capital, and now covers Greater Manchester as well.
Why it exists
Property portals are organised around individual flats. They are very good at telling you what a specific one-bed on a specific street costs, and almost useless at the question most people actually start with: which area should you be looking in at all?
That question has three moving parts that interact — what you can afford, how long you are willing to travel, and what you want within walking distance. Change your rent ceiling by £150 a month and the realistic map of a city shifts. Change your office from Canary Wharf to Paddington, or from Piccadilly to MediaCityUK, and it shifts again. This site exists to make those trade-offs visible before you start booking viewings.
Who runs it
This is an independent, self-funded project run by a single developer in the UK. It is not affiliated with Transport for London, Transport for Greater Manchester, the West of England or West Yorkshire Combined Authorities, Transport for Edinburgh, Transport Scotland, the Greater London Authority, any local council or foreign public authority, or any letting agent or property portal. Nothing on it is immigration, legal, tax or financial advice.
Every rent estimate, commute band and lifestyle score on the site was assembled and reviewed by hand rather than scraped and published unchecked. Where a figure is an estimate — and most of them are — the page says so, and the methodology page explains exactly how it was derived.
What the site covers
- 95 London neighbourhood guides — rent, transport, lifestyle scores and an honest list of trade-offs for each area.
- 57 Greater Manchester area guides — the same treatment across all 10 boroughs of the conurbation, with its own rent baseline, council tax and journey times. Browse the Manchester section.
- 10 commute guides — where to live if you need to reach a given part of the city regularly.
- Salary guides — what a given gross salary leaves you after UK tax and National Insurance, and what that realistically rents.
- Area comparisons — head-to-head write-ups for the pairs people genuinely weigh against each other.
Where the numbers come from
London rent figures were last reviewed on , drawing on:
- ONS Price Index of Private Rents, borough averages by bedroom count, July 2026
- Rightmove, Zoopla, OpenRent, and SpareRoom visible listing samples
- Manual neighbourhood review for local premium or discount against the borough baseline
Greater Manchester figures are held separately and were last reviewed on , drawing on:
- ONS Price Index of Private Rents, borough averages by bedroom count, July 2026
- Rightmove, Zoopla, OpenRent and SpareRoom visible listing samples across Greater Manchester
- Manual neighbourhood review for the local premium or discount against the borough baseline
The two cities use different baselines on purpose, and the Manchester methodology sets out where its method differs from the London one — travel bands instead of tube zones, a Mayoral precept instead of a GLA one, and no live journey planner behind the commute times.
What this site is not
It is not a live property portal, and it does not list individual flats. It is not a guaranteed route planner — for live times and disruptions, use Transport for London or Transport for Greater Manchester. It is not financial, legal or mortgage advice, and the take-home pay calculations are illustrative rather than a substitute for proper tax advice.
Rent estimates describe an area, not a property. Two flats on the same street can differ by hundreds of pounds a month on condition and size alone.
How it is funded
The site is free to use and is funded by advertising, which is why you may see ads on these pages. Advertising has no influence on which neighbourhoods rank where — the rankings are produced by the scoring functions described in the methodology, and no area, agent or landlord can pay to be featured. See the privacy policy for how advertising cookies are handled.
Spotted something wrong?
Local knowledge beats a dataset. If a rent figure looks off, a station has changed, or an area description does not match how it actually feels to live there, please say so — corrections are genuinely welcome and get applied.