Owning your own home

Disagree on Catford.

It has bit and bobs of decent housing stock but the fact remains it will always be carved up by infrastructure, which limits the amount of pavement life and the amount of community/smug middle class momentum.
Think about all the places that have blown up.
East Dulwich - urban village, small roads, local shops and restaurants.
Stoke Newington - same
Walthamstow village - similar
etc etc

That's not to say there aren't the odd row of shops that might end up with a half decent cafe or pub, but as wider area it will always be limited and the whole sale goldrush that we can see in Brockley is unlikely to happen there.

anecdotal - 4 of my peers have moved to Catford and they have ALL fucked off elsewhere as soon as they have had kids. It's just not a pleasant environment to exist in.

I love living in Catford! Yeah it's got a massive gyratory in the middle of it but it's got plenty of pavement life and smug middle class busybodies. We went to a pop up supper club in the shopping centre last weekend, the Turkish and Italian restaurants are brilliant, the Catford Tavern was ace and its reincarnation looks like it might be even better when they start doing food and the council is totally redoing the (pedestrianised) bit between the shopping centre and the stations (including hosting a farmers' market). And that's just the centre - the bit where we live has its own mini high street, with a family run butchers and Co-op and chemist and cafes etc, and that bit has nice wide pavements and bike parking is also being given a makeover - council funded but largely led by the local community groups.

I don't think there'll be a goldrush and I am perfectly happy about that - but on balance, if prices were the same in Catford and Brockley, I'm pretty sure I'd choose Catford.

And longer term (I appreciate this isn't particularly relevant as it'll be years, but I think the fact that it exists shows that the council are aware of the problems caused by the infrastructure and the smaller scale stuff they're doing now is part of a wider approach to tackling it) there is the Catford Plan.

And it's got a giant plastic cat.