Finding a home with a garden can be on most buyer’s wish list but less than a third of properties for sale in towns and cities in the UK have access to one and in London it can be even more difficult, new research suggests.
Some 31.4% of properties on the market do not have access to a garden and the worse location if you are in search of your own green space is Gateshead where 55.1% of the properties on sale lack a back garden.
Three out of the five worst UK towns and cities for outside space are in the north west of England, and eight of ten of the worst cities are in north England, the research from online estate agent HouseSimple shows.
Contrast that with the coastal town of Grimsby, in Yorkshire and the Humber, which is the garden capital of the UK based on current property listings, with 93% of properties for sale having gardens.
In London it is even harder to find a home with a garden as 39.5% of properties currently on the market in the capital don’t have an outside space. A property in Tower Hamlets is less likely to have a garden with just 34.4% of properties with an outside leisure space.
The locations in London most likely to have homes with gardens are Bexley with 85.4% and Bromley with 84.2%. Even areas that are regarded as quite leafy, such as Camden and Islington do not have many homes with gardens at just 45.7% and 41% respectively.
Looking at the top 10 UK cities with the largest populations, Liverpool at 59.6%, London at 60.5% and Manchester at 62.8% rank the lowest in terms of properties on the market with gardens. Meanwhile Bristol has 79.6% of properties listed with an outside space.
‘With the need to build more homes in the UK, and space at a premium, we could well see fewer and fewer new build properties with private gardens. Even new build family homes rarely come with the expansive back gardens you might have seen 30 to 40 years ago,’ said Alex Gosling, House Simple chief executive officer.
‘In heavily populated areas, developments are squeezed in and the reality is that private gardens takes up valuable square footage. Hence, we are likely to see more modern block of flats to meet housing demand, and the outside space will inevitably be sacrificed,’ he pointed out.
‘However, there are plenty of towns, such as Grimsby, Crawley and Southport, where the majority of properties have private outside space. Homes further away from major cities, are more likely to have houses not flats and larger back gardens,’ he added.
