Help to Buy homes near Walthamstow: new flats, bars and shops help Highams Park raise its game for first-time buyers

Finding pockets of value in London means exploring locations you may never have heard of before, chasing the ripple of buyers who are being relentlessly squeezed out of newly fashionable postcodes.

Take Highams Park, three miles north-east of Walthamstow but with a considerably lower profile. Yet it is the next logical step for buyers who have already been pushed out of Hackney and into Waltham Forest.

“Highams Park is becoming a little trendier,” said Michael Breen, director of WJ Meade estate agents. “We are seeing buyers coming out from Walthamstow, and Wanstead, and also from north London, because of the affordability.”

Highams Parks’ streets of period houses are certainly good value by London standards. A three-bedroom Edwardian terrace would cost about £530,000, and a four-bedroom Thirties semi about £600,000.

This established suburb, with its plentiful green space and family homes, is not the kind of place for huge regeneration but a patchwork of new projects is helping to raise its game and providing a better range of starter homes for first-time buyers.

The Art Deco Regal Cinema in Hale End Road, closed since 1971, is to be revived by Mammoth Capital as The Regal, with two screens run by the managers of Dalston’s Rio Cinema, plus a café, a bar and 30 homes. Work on the 18-month project is due to begin this year.

Developers have already scented potential in E4, including its fast and frequent transport links to the City.

In January Fairview New Homes sold the last of 66 private flats at its Endeavour scheme near Highams Park station, with most buyers coming out of east London and using low-deposit Help to Buy.

The company is confident enough in the area to be returning with a second scheme. Just over 80 one-, two- and three-bedroom flats at Discovery, in Larkshall Road, will go on sale early next year.

Jeremy Gee, board director for the housebuilder, believes the location’s transport links, open space and peaceful suburban feel will make it a hotspot of the future.

Estate agent Breen agrees. “The market has been quite steady through the dip in the housing market. It is not a market which has thrived on buy to let in the past, so the changes in stamp duty have not affected it like they have in other areas. There are new restaurants and shops starting to open up, too.”

On the horizon Sixty Bricks, Waltham Forest council’s new housebuilding company, is building 45 flats at Lena Kennedy Close, of which half will be lower-cost, aimed at local people and key workers within the borough. Work begins this summer, with the first residents moving in next year.

Right now, on the borders of Highams Park and Walthamstow, homes at Banbury Park are on sale.

This £52 million mixed-use scheme has just over 351 flats above shops, offices, and an on-site crèche. Prices start at £395,000, with stamp duty and legal fees paid on some flats, and Help to Buy available to cut entry costs.