Owning your own home

am I nuts for considering to buy a place in seven sisters?

Perhaps.
You are nuts to consider it if

• you want a choice of places (or even one place!) for a pleasant drink or evening meal within 5 minutes walk
  
• you won't be able to live with litter, flytipping and adult men urinating against trees or walls in broad daylight
  
• groups of men hanging around makes you feel unsafe
  
  

you are not nuts if

• you want a lot of home for your money
  
• you want to be cycling distance from the centre of London but also have good public transport connections
  
• you want plenty of local shops and everyday chains within walking distance
  
• you want somewhere you will be on at least "good morning" terms with your neighbours
  
• you don't mind walking 20 mins or so to find a decent pub/meal, or get a bus
  
• you want to be close to Dalston/Stokie/Hackney but can't afford it
  
• you don't mind people hanging around as long as they don't bother you
  
  

You might be nuts if you have kids and need to consider schools. I don't have kids so can't say, but I do know that both our neighbours raised kids here and they seem pretty sucessful.

I've lived here for seven years and it has changed a lot in the last two years or so. There are artists' communities East and West of here and we are seeing more people and events coming out from that. But it's gone up and down in the past as well. I would not recommend anyone moving here planning to hang in with gritted teeth until it becomes the next Church Street. You must be confident you will be happy here as it is.

Seven Sisters suits us. We wanted a house with a garden not a flat, and decided that living somewhere too small for us would make us more miserable than living somewhere down at heel. We have good friends and neighbours here, we use the local shops, we enjoy having a choice of local parks and we don't eat out every week so we don't mind having to wakl/bike/bus it a bit when we do. But the lack of care some people have for the place they live does depress us sometimes. We have to remind ourselves that we only see the effects from the ignorant minority because the results hang around.

We moved from a rented flat in Finsbury Park a few years before FP took a lurch up the social scale. At the time, our budget would have bought a non-garden 2 bed or a garden 1 bed flat in FP, or a house in Seven Sisters. We didn't think FP was significantly nicer than Seven Sisters enough to justify the lack of space.

If you 've got any specific questions feel free to ask.