“We are a completely dog-friendly, child-friendly, laptop-friendly, prosecco-friendly environment,” reads a sign outside a restaurant a short walk away from Wandsworth Town station.
It serves as a welcome to the area’s prominent demographics and their habits. Many mums – and some dads – can be seen out pushing prams on a sunny Thursday morning or making a pit stop at one of the many independent cafes.
But for some young families hoping to get on the property ladder in this south London district, Wandsworth doesn’t feel all that inviting when their finances don’t go far enough.
High childcare costs in the capital’s “nappy valley” are leaving millennials weighing up what they can afford, with holidays off the table for some high-earning homeowners, and renters uncertain if they’ll ever be able to buy in the area they’ve made their home.
‘I’ll have to work extra to pay for nursery’
Terry Sarcia and her husband manage their daughter’s childcare using their 15 free hours’ entitlement to cover the full cost of nursery.
“Before we had to top up £300 every term, so it’s not so bad. I’m lucky that I’m just part-time so she doesn’t really need to go to nursery full-time,” Terry, a 33-year-old nurse, said.
But with her daughter due to turn four in January, Terry is thinking about increasing nursery hours before she starts school. “Then we’ll have to pay top up… I think it’ll be like £600 per month. That just means I’ll have to work extra to pay for that, so [I’ll] have to do bank shifts,” she said.
Compared with Scotland and Wales, England is the most expensive nation for three and four-year-olds. The average cost of a full-time nursery place has risen by 10 per cent to £6,600. “It’s extortionate,” one woman pushing her child in a pram said in passing, when asked about nursery fees.
Terry, a renter, hopes to buy in the neighbourhood, but the new-build high-rises towering above Wandsworth’s leafy streets don’t appeal. “I have read articles and news about people selling at a loss,” she said. “If we can… we want to buy a house, maybe a ground-floor flat or something like that, but not one of the multi-story ones.”
‘Scared to get my flat valued’
For 34-year-old Grace Ritchie, who works in marketing, substantial nursery fees mean she won’t be returning to work five days a week when her maternity leave ends.
Her son is due to attend nursery three days a week, at around £1,600 a month. The childcare bill has prompted her and her husband to make some other lifestyle changes. “It just means we cut back on holidays and we don’t do extravagant things like we used to,” the mother-of-one said.
Grace did not disclose her and her husband’s incomes, but said they do not qualify for free childcare hours. Parents do not get this support if at least one earns over £100,000. However, she’s been able to lower the costs by working one fewer day a week so she can care for her son, and roping in her mum to help.
“I’m in the fortunate position where my mum is local so she can have him,” she said. “I would struggle if it was five days a week because then it jumps up like another £1,200. It’ll be nearly three grand a month just to have him looked after, which would be tough.”
Wandsworth is home to some of the highest earners in London. The average household income there exceeds £85,000, according to a Trust for London analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics.
That suggests some families will fall into the childcare tax trap, leaving them potentially tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket because they narrowly miss out on entitlement to free childcare hours at nursery.
Grace and her husband own a two-bed maisonette in Earlsfield, in south-west London close to Wandworth, and hope to move to a larger home in the coming months. But – like many homeowners around the country – she has concerns about whether they’ll be able to get a return on their investment.
“We’re looking to move next year and I’m scared to get it valued because I think it’s going to be probably less than we bought it for,” she said.
She estimates a £60,000 loss but thinks it will be something they just have to “suck up”.
One estate agent told The i Paper she had seen prospective sellers resort to letting their flats after struggling to sell because of expensive service charges, while rental prices have jumped hundreds of pounds.
Karen Kuhl, director of Realm Estates, said: “I’m not really going to take on blocks where the service charge is five and six grand because it’s just not really going to sell.”
Analysis by The Telegraph this year found nearly 40 per cent of flats built and bought in Wandsworth since 2010 had been sold at a loss in the last five years.
But Kuhl is optimistic about the market. She said around 50 per cent of her firm’s clientele was made up of people in their late 20s who were “doing well” for themselves or had help from parents. Millennial parents were “really looking at the houses”, she added.
Historically low council tax has long been a selling point for Wandsworth, but last month the council proposed a 94 per cent rise for 2027/28, meaning the average household will face a £958 increase to their annual bill.
‘The investment is not worth it’
Rayna Radkova, a 45-year-old accountant, isn’t happy about the proposed rise and has petitioned against it. She is currently staying at home to look after her son, and has been crunching the numbers as she plans to put him into nursery soon.
“[It] probably will be £700 at least, monthly,” she said.
She will take advantage of the free childcare hours but would like to put her son into nursery full-time, so is not expecting the bill to reduce significantly with the entitlement.
It definitely means “no holidays”, she added.
Rayna is renting and has no plans to buy as “it’s not the best time”. When she does, she is not sure it will be in Wandsworth. “We’re trying to find something around London,” she said, but after “doing the maths” and taking into account travel costs, she’s not convinced that leaving the area would mean she’d be significantly better off.
Annie Verde, 31, and Benjamin LaPierre, 36, are two renters who have no plans to buy a home anytime soon. The couple don’t feel they can get value for money.
Benjamin, who moved to the UK from Belgium, seven months ago said: “The market is here is very, very expensive in comparison to where I’m from.” Annie added: “I think the investment is not worth it, even if we wish to make it.”
The pair moved into a one-bedroom flat in February, paying around £2,200 a month, and have already seen rental prices skyrocket since then, with rent for similar properties in the region of £2,700.
Annie said: “If we wished to find something of the same quality with the same spaces, we’re not finding anything.”