A three-bedroom detached house for sale in Bracknell, Berkshire. It’s asking price is £750,000 through Duncan Yeardley
(Picture: Rightmove / Duncan Yeardley Estate Agents)Crossrail is breathing new life into London’s fringe and it’s set to go even further this year, with new stations set to open in 2023. But that’s not the only thing commuters have to look forward to. Millions of pounds are being poured into other town centres, while planning has been granted for thousands of homes.
Here are the regeneration zones to watch in the home counties in 2023.
Reading
It is a latecomer to the Crossrail line, but when direct services to the West End, City, and Canary Wharf begin later this year this Berkshire town will become a realistic alternative to the west London suburbs with services to Zone 1 taking less than an hour.
Meanwhile the opening of a new train station three miles south of the town centre, at Green Park, will give locals an extra transport option.
Once a rather dull provincial town, Reading has evolved hugely in recent years into a nearly-city full of shopping malls, cinemas, and sports facilities.
On the horizon is the £850m Station Hill development with 1,300 new homes and almost 100,000 sq ft of new shops and leisure facilities.
The first - rental - homes on the site will be ready to move into at the end of this year, and the first offices will open early in 2024.
Perhaps as a result of all this house prices jumped nine per cent in the past year, according to research by Hamptons, and are up almost 64 per cent in the past decade.
Louise and Paul Allison have seen Reading change over the past few years. They moved there six years ago for its train links to London – where Paul, 34, works as a railway engineer – and have seen its range of shops and restaurants get better and better.
“It is the easiest place to commute from without paying silly London prices,” says Louise, 36, founder of Wonder & Wren, an organic babywear company. The couple paid just over £300,000 for their three-bedroom house four years ago, and now have a 21-month-old daughter, Evie.
For Louise, Reading works because the town centre has all the mod-cons she needs, she has met a strong circle of friends through baby groups, and the family can head out to prettier towns and villages, like Goring or Henley, when they want a bit more historic charm. “It has got it all, really,” she says.
Romford
Yes, it’s virtually in Essex. But with Liverpool Street half an hour away thanks to Crossrail, Romford is now just as well connected as most of London’s Zone 3 — and an awful lot cheaper despite strong recent price growth.
According to Hamptons local prices grew seven per cent during 2022, and a whopping 93 per cent over the past decade.
Emma Wallington of Yopa estimates that buyers should budget around £280,000 to £300,000 for a two-bedroom flat and £450,000 to £500,000 for a three-bedroom house. Where once Romford was very much a buy-to-let landlord market, value like this has been enticing first time buyers out of Hackney and Forest Gate over the past few years.
Romford’s appeal has been broadened thanks to Crossrail but buyers have always liked its good local amenities - two cinemas, Hainault Forest up the road, a new leisure centre with ice skating and two pools, and some great places to eat and drink.
And Romford’s future looks exciting. In April last year planning permission was granted for Rom Valley Gardens, a £350m urban village close to the station, which will include around 1,000 new homes, public gardens, a piazza lined with shops, cafes, and restaurants, and a gym.
Construction work is due to start on site early this year and the first homes will go on sale in 2024.
Meanwhile, Havering Council is rebooting the town’s Waterloo Estate and will create almost 1,400 new homes on the site. Work is due to start this summer and will go on until 2030.
“Realistically, I don’t think Romford will be as heavily impacted … [by the property downturn] … as other areas because of all the investment coming in,” said Wallington. “It has always been quite a buoyant market anyway, and even if the market does dip down it will soon level out.”
Bracknell
The post war era town centre is in the throes of massive regeneration. Next year The Deck, a major part of the work and one which has taken so long to arrive that local wags have taken to calling the building site The Wreck, is due to open with a new public square fringed with shops and restaurants.
The town’s The Lexicon shopping and leisure centre has already been redeveloped, and now features 160 shops, restaurants, bars, and a cinema.
Meanwhile the first residents are due to start moving into the circa 400 town centre homes currently being built by developer Countryside this autumn, and a new tranche of homes will go on sale in the spring.
Lucy Spencer has seen huge changes since she bought her first flat in Bracknell in 2017. She was brought up in Ascot but chose Bracknell because she would get more bang for her buck. Using Help to Buy she was able to buy a three-bedroom apartment with a garden for £350,000.
The rebooted The Lexicon opened shortly after she moved in, and she is impressed by the range of shops and cafes, from Fenwick to an outpost of Gail’s Bakery.
Lucy, 33, tutoring director at Education Boutique, does a lot of travel for work and tends to swerve the chugger trains to London from Bracknell and instead make a 15-minute drive to Slough where she can pick up a fast train to Paddington which takes just 14 minutes.
Having sampled Bracknell life Lucy has decided to stay put. At the start of this year she sold her flat for £385,000 and invested in a four-bedroom house which cost £585,000.
“Its not got nightclubs or anything like that, but it has got some beautiful pubs, the town centre cinema has just been refurbished, and there are lots of places to meet your friends,” she says. “I have really noticed that people who want to go out shopping for the day now come to Bracknell – ten or 15 years ago they would definitely have been going to Windsor instead, but things have really changed.”
SevenCapital has described the rebirth of Bracknell as the “most successful and extensive urban regeneration project in the south east”, pumping around £770m into the town and helping raise its profile to compete with neighbouring towns like Windsor and Reading.
What Bracknell has always had in its favour is good schools, and an easy commute to central London (just over an hour to Paddington). It is close to Windsor Great Park and the 2,600-acre Swinley Forest, owned by the Crown Estate, which offers lots of activities including horse riding, and mountain bike trails.
Over the past year average prices in the town are up six per cent; during the past decade they have jumped 66 per cent according to Hamptons.
