Living in Tooting

Tooting has one of the best concentrations of South Asian food in Britain. Upper Tooting Road and Tooting High Street, running either side of Tooting Broadway station, are lined with Tamil, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Gujarati and Punjabi restaurants, sweet shops, grocers and sari shops, and the area's two indoor markets, Tooting Market and Broadway Market, have added bars, street food and small independent traders to their long-standing stalls.

It is also a hospital town. St George's, one of London's largest teaching hospitals and home to a medical school, is on the southern side of the area, and many doctors, nurses and students rent locally, which gives Tooting a younger, more transient population than its family-house streets suggest.

Tooting Bec Common, on the northern side, is large and varied, with woodland, sports pitches and Tooting Bec Lido, a vast open-air swimming pool opened in 1906 where members swim year-round. Tooting Common and Wandsworth Common are both within reach. The Granada, an extravagantly decorated 1930s cinema that is now a bingo hall, is one of London's most spectacular listed interiors.

The Northern line's Morden branch has two stations here, Tooting Broadway and Tooting Bec, reaching the City in about twenty-five minutes and the West End via Kennington; peak trains are crowded by the time they reach Clapham. Housing is mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, many converted into flats, along with mansion blocks and the early LCC cottage streets of Totterdown Fields. Rents are below those in Clapham and Balham, though the gap has narrowed. Tooting suits people who value food, green space and a tube line, and who want a lived-in high street rather than a polished one.