Best London wards to rent under £1,700 a month

Plenty of property portals will show you a rent estimate for an exact street, sometimes an exact building. Almost none of that precision is real — the only rent data actually published with any rigour, the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, is measured at borough level, once a month, from real tenancies. Anything more granular than that is a model guessing at a number, dressed up to look like a fact.

So this guide does the honest version instead. First: which boroughs have a real, published 2-bed rent under £1,700 a month. Second, inside each of those boroughs: which ward actually scores well on everything else — safety, connectivity, nature, the rest of the WAYB model — rather than just being the borough average. The rent figure is borough-wide and real. The ward pick is ours, and it is where the actual decision should happen.

Sutton has essentially the same 2-bed rent as Croydon, £1,551 versus £1,572 a month, and the best borough-average score of any borough under £1,700. Redbridge, also under the ceiling at £1,679, sits at the 6th percentile.

Boroughs under £1,700

7

2-bed monthly rent, ONS PIPR, July 2026

Cheapest borough

£1,523

Bexley, 2-bed median

Widest score gap

85 pts

Sutton (91st pctl) vs. Redbridge (6th pctl)

The seven affordable boroughs

Rent figures are the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, 2-bed category, the most recent published month. “Borough score” is the average WAYB overall score across every ward in that borough, shown as a percentile against all 33 London boroughs — so a borough can be cheap and still rank near the bottom on everything else, or cheap and rank near the top. Both happen below.

Sutton is the standout: the best borough-average score of the entire affordable set — 91st percentile against all 33 boroughs — at £1,551 a month. Redbridge is the reverse case: under the same ceiling at £1,679, but with the lowest borough-average score of the set, 6th percentile. Same rent bracket, opposite bets.

The ward to actually pick, borough by borough

Wallington North, Suttonoverall 52 · safety 66 · education 56

The best all-rounder on this list. Wallington North combines a solid safety score (66), among the highest education scores of any ward here (56), and a nature score (69) helped by Beddington Park nearby. Sutton's train services into Victoria and London Bridge are reliable rather than fast, but for a renter who wants the borough's strong average to actually show up on the ground, this is the ward that delivers it.

Greenhill, Harrow would sit here, but Harrow's latest published 2-bed rent is £1,711 a month — over the £1,700 ceiling — so it drops out of this guide until the borough rent comes back under it.

Chislehurst, Bromleyoverall 46 · safety 70 · nature 73

Chislehurst is the quiet, leafy option — safety (70) and nature (73) are both among the strongest of any ward in this guide, reflecting the commons and the village-y core around Chislehurst station. Connectivity (28) and culture (15) are both low: this is a ward for a renter who has already decided they want calm over convenience, with a direct but infrequent rail line into Victoria.

Marshalls & Rise Park, Haveringoverall 46 · market 72 · safety 77

The strongest market score of any ward in this guide (72), paired with a safety score (77) that rivals Chislehurst's. This is outer Romford — semi-detached interwar housing, Central Park close by, a genuinely residential feel. Culture score (14) is among the lowest of the set; this is not a ward with much of a night out on its own doorstep.

Fairfield, Croydonoverall 49 · connectivity 93 · safety 23

The trade-off ward. Fairfield contains East Croydon station, and its connectivity score (93) is close to the maximum — fast trains to London Bridge and Victoria, trams, and one of the best-connected town centres outside the centre of London. Safety (23) is the lowest of any ward in this guide by a wide margin, reflecting the density of nightlife and town-centre reported crime around the station. This is the ward for someone who has decided the commute matters more than anything else, with eyes open about what that costs elsewhere in the score.

Ickenham & South Harefield, Hillingdonoverall 44 · safety 84 · connectivity 25

The safest ward in this entire guide (84), and a nature score (77) to match — this is the far western edge of Greater London, bordering genuine green belt. It is also the least connected ward here (25); the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines reach Ickenham station, but the run into central London is a long one. Hillingdon's low borough-average score does not show up in this particular ward — Ickenham & South Harefield is the outlier that pulls the borough's reputation up, not down.

One more, at the very bottom of the range

Sidcup, Bexley is worth a mention even though it did not make the six above: Bexley has the cheapest borough-wide rent on this entire list (£1,523), and Sidcup ward — overall score 45, safety 62, nature 68 — is a reasonable, unremarkable pick inside it. Nothing about Sidcup stands out the way Wallington North or Chislehurst do, which is itself useful information: Bexley's low borough-average score (24th percentile) is a fairer reflection of its wards than Hillingdon's is of Ickenham.

What this data can and can't tell you

It cannot tell you the rent for a specific ward, still less a specific street — that number does not exist as real published data below borough level, and any site telling you otherwise is modelling, not measuring. What it can tell you is which affordable boroughs are punching above their rent bracket (Sutton, and Ickenham & South Harefield inside Hillingdon) and which wards inside an affordable borough are worth the extra look versus the ones that are just cheap because something is missing (Fairfield's safety score, most of these wards' culture scores). Use the borough rent to set the budget. Use the ward score to decide where inside it you actually want to live.

Methodology & sources

Rent figures are the ONS Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR), 2-bed category, most recent published month (July 2026), by borough — the finest geography ONS publishes this series at. Boroughs count as affordable when that figure is under £1,700 a month: Bexley, Havering, Sutton, Croydon, Hillingdon, Bromley and Redbridge. Borough-average overall score is the unweighted mean of the WAYB overall score across every ward in the borough, converted to a percentile against all 33 London boroughs. Ward scores (safety, connectivity, nature, market, culture, education) are the standard WAYB nine-layer model, calculated per pocket and averaged into each ward's score. Every rent figure in this piece is the published borough number; WAYB's paid ward pages include a modelled 2-bed rent figure for members who want that level of detail, clearly labelled as an estimate rather than an observed asking price. See our data sources & methodology for the full dataset list.