1st September 2025
11mins
Prime Central London has never been an officially demarcated location, but rather a shorthand for the best – and most expensive – places to live in the heart of the British capital.
Traditionally, Prime Central London was considered to be confined to a handful of key neighbourhoods south and east of Hyde Park. And back in 2000, Knightsbridge was first amongst equals.
But over the years, careful curation of once largely-commercial districts has redrawn the map.
“Mayfair was once very commercial, but developers came along and bought up unloved or underused buildings – like the old American Embassy on Grosvenor Square – and converted them into very high end, luxurious residential buildings,” said Camilla Dell, managing partner of Black Brick. Simultaneously, the Grosvenor Estate was working hard to upgrade Mayfair and Belgravia’s main shopping streets like Mount Street and Elizabeth Street, turning them into charming community hubs with great boutiques and cafes. More recently, it has worked the same magic on Eccleston Yards, a former power station now rebooted as a complex of shops, restaurants, gyms, and offices on the border of Belgravia and Victoria, which is drawing in not just shoppers and diners, but buyers.
Knightsbridge, meanwhile, has seen its fortunes fade a little. “Areas do go out of fashion,” said Dell. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was the place to buy a status symbol property, but I think what really lacks, is a cohesive masterplan for the area like Grosvenor has for Mayfair and Howard de Walden has for Marylebone.
While Knightsbridge and Kensington, with its chain store dominated High Road and heavy traffic, are no longer objects of desire then Marylebone, once a London backwater known more for the health clinics of Harley Street than anything else, has blossomed into a property swan.
Its landowner, the Howard de Walden Estate, has worked hard to rebrand Marylebone High Street as an eclectic, artisanal destination, with a lovely weekend farmers’ market, great restaurants – including the recently burned-out Chiltern Firehouse, which commanded endless column inches and raised Marylebone’s profile – and interesting independent shops.
At the same time, developers started investing in prime sites in Marylebone, with new developments like Chiltern Place and The Chilterns, which helped cement its position within Prime Central London. “There is actually a waiting list to buy at Chiltern Place, which is exceptional in the current market,” said Dell. “It has become extremely desirable.”
The average price of London’s homes at the turn of the century, sound impossibly cheap in today’s context. The average sale price in the capital was just £139,611 according to the Land Registry, while an average property in Kensington & Chelsea traded for under £400,000.
Price growth was rapid and dramatic in the early noughties, largely thanks to the huge influx of overseas buyers rushing into London after the 2008 financial crisis. This exponential growth has since been suppressed by tax increases and the Brexit referendum, the double whammy which stunned the market in 2016.
Nonetheless, an average home in Kensington & Chelsea, the borough which contains most of Prime Central London, currently trades for more than £1.4m, an almost fourfold increase since 2000.
According to the prime London house price analyst LonRes, the average price per sq ft of a Prime Central London property was just £580 back in 2000. Today, a sq ft of real estate will cost you £1,627.
“I don’t think we will see that kind of growth again,” said Dell. “There was a point when there was a perfect storm which propelled London’s market to the top of the global league, but that time has passed. I do still think growth is possible, but just not the double digit annual growth we saw then.”
The seismic influence which luxurious new developments can have on a local property market, are clearly illustrated by changing data on London’s highest priced streets.
Twenty years ago, in 2005, London’s five most expensive streets were all clustered in a tiny area around the south west corner of Hyde Park according to property portal Mouseprice – and you could buy an average home on any one of them for well under £4.5m.
Top spot went to Earls Terrace (average price: £4.3m), at the time home to JK Rowling, alongside nearby Victoria Road, both in Kensington (£3.5m), Ilchester Place, which is on the border of Kensington and Holland Park (£3.2m), and a duo of squares – Chelsea and Carlyle (£3.9m and £3.4m), both between Hyde Park and the King’s Road.
Today, however, London’s property wealth map has been withdrawn.
Recent research from Lloyds found that Knightsbridge, largely thanks to the presence of One Hyde Park, is currently London’s most expensive address with an average sale price of more than £21m. Ilchester Place proves its staying power to hold onto second place (average price: £19.4m), but Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, with its extraordinary lavish branded residences, and nearby Ashburton Place, which has been elevated by the presence of the super prime Clarges Mayfair building, are now within the top five, along with pretty, slightly bohemian Clarendon Road, north of Hyde Park in Notting Hill.
Black Brick was founded back in 2007 and over the intervening years, the profile and wants of our buyers has changed considerably – and so has their budget.
The off market sale of homes not advertised online was important back in 2007, with 21 per cent of our homes sourced “under the counter”. Today, that has increased to over a third because increasing numbers of vendors appreciate the privacy of selling off plan rather than having the whole world know how much their property is worth, and what their kitchen looks like. Above £10 million, as much as 80% of the properties we source for clients today are off market.
In 2007, a quarter of our buyers were looking for an investment property to rent out, but so far this year, the majority of our clients have been after a home for themselves – as prices have grown, compressing yields, taxes and interest rates have risen making buy to let investment less attractive in central London. However, this trend may reverse, with a softer sales market rental yields in London looking more attractive today, than they have done in over a decade. So for those looking to diversify their wealth, or with long term plans to occupy the property in the future, buying now and renting the property out is attractive.
Our proportion of British buyers has remained remarkably stable, at about one in four, but in 2007 we were busy with clients from Nigeria, who accounted for almost half of our sales. “At that time the economy there was booming, and Nigerians definitely see London as their second home.”
This year, there is a new breed of international buyer in town – Americans, who have represented almost a third of Black Brick’s clients in 2025.
“There is nervousness around the Trump administration. Americans are not necessarily relocating, but buying boltholes in case they want to move here in the future,” said Dell. She feels the rise of American buyers is equally thanks to an uptick in the nation’s wealth. As of last year, the US had 23.8 million millionaires and more than 800 billionaires. “People just travel further, go on holiday more, companies have offices in more than one country,” said Dell. “The world has become much more global. And as Americans have become wealthier, they have started to think about buying the European home they have always aspired to – and for many Americans, European means London. They love the fact the language is the same, they can hop on a train and be in Paris in 3 hours, or a plane and be in Rome. Great European cities are accessible. In the US, you hop on a plane for 3 hours and you are still in the US.”
Another big change, and one clearly influenced by the pandemic, has been a switch in the type of property our buyers want – family homes in the leafy suburbs with plenty of space to work from home. In 2007, 83 per cent of our clients went on to purchase an apartment. So far this year, 40 per cent have bought houses.
This change may in turn help explain their increasing budgets. In 2007, Black Brick’s clients spent just under £2m on their London homes. So far this year they have spent an average £4.1m.
Stamp Duty has been around for hundreds of years, but at the start of the 21st century, rates were appealingly low. In March 2000, a new banding system came into force with buyers paying one per cent on the value of properties valued between £60,000 and £250,000, three per cent on the next £250,000 to £500,000, and four per cent above that.
Today, buyers pay Stamp Duty of up to 12 per cent depending on the value of the property. Second home owners must also pay a five per cent surcharge. Overseas buyers also pay a two per cent surcharge, meaning a potential top rate of 19 per cent.
Over the past few weeks, there have been rumours of the biggest Stamp Duty shakeup in living memory – a plan to replace the buying tax with a new sales tax could be announced as soon as October’s budget.
“Getting rid of Stamp Duty could be a gamechanger for London,” said Dell. “The devil will be in the detail of course, but in principle, getting rid of Stamp Duty could be a great thing. It has been a disaster, ever since (the former Chancellor of the Exchequer) George Osborne started tinkering with it in 2014. It has reduced the mobility of the whole market. “
With its country-village vibes and large houses, Totteridge has long been considered a prime suburban address. Our clients, who grew up in north London, were keen to buy a second home there. They had found a house they loved but were not confident about handling the negotiations or the buying process.
They therefore decided to use Black Brick’s negotiation-only service, to secure expert advice to guide them through the sale. Having inspected the house, and armed with a detailed knowledge of past sales in the area, we were happy to help.
Originally listed for £2.75m, we were able to persuade the vendor to accept an offer of £2.6m. At £577 per square foot the house represented excellent value.
We then found our clients professional team, including a surveyor who quickly spotted that work was needed to a garden wall. On the basis of their advice, we were able to negotiate the price down by a further £25,000, bringing their total discount to £175,000.
Our clients were relocating to London from the USA and wanted to buy a freehold home with at least four bedrooms and two bathrooms, good transport links to the City, and great schools.
Even with a budget of £1.5m this was a big ask so we concentrated our search on areas which are not only well priced, but where freehold houses have a strong record of holding, and increasing, their value.
They were particularly taken with one of the homes we showed them because of its potential to extend both into the loft and on the ground floor. This meant that not only could they create a bespoke family home, but also add value to the property which was listed for £1.2m.
To help our clients visualise what they could do to the house, we arranged a viewing of a neighbouring property on the same street that had been upgraded, and then introduced them to top notch architects and contractors who could give them a good idea of cost and timeframe.
When it came to negotiation, we persuaded the owners to accept an offer of just over £1m – ten per cent below asking price.
We would be delighted to hear from you to discuss your own property requirements. For a non-obligatory consultation, please contact us.
