A city with more green space than most people give it credit for.
The two things that actually shape a solar quote here, beyond the postcode.
The Green Belt most people never see.
The Metropolitan Green Belt, the protected countryside ring that stops London sprawling outward, covers roughly 508,000 hectares, about three times the size of Greater London itself. Most of it sits just beyond the city boundary in Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, but it shapes the outer boroughs too, keeping places like Bromley, Havering and Enfield noticeably greener and lower-density than their zone-2 postcodes suggest.
It’s not a solar statistic, but it says something about the properties we survey out there: proper gardens, more detached and semi-detached housing, and roofs with genuine space to work with, not just central London’s wall-to-wall terraces. Tree canopy covers around 19.6% of Greater London too, concentrated more heavily in the outer boroughs, so shading from mature trees is something we check for at survey stage far more often than most people expect from a capital city.
32 boroughs, no single housing type.
London’s housing stock spans Victorian terraces close to the centre, Edwardian bay-fronted semis further out, and a wide belt of 1920s and 30s suburban semis and detached homes built during the Metro-land boom, when the railways marketed a house with a garden as the reason to move out. Newer developments fill in the gaps in between.
That range is exactly why we don’t quote off a standard package. A terrace, a 1930s semi and a modern new-build all need a different approach at survey stage, whichever London borough you’re in. Conservation areas and Article 4 Directions also turn up more often in London than in most counties, particularly in Inner London and around historic borough centres, so we check planning status as part of every survey rather than assuming a standard roof-mounted array will always be permitted development.