Yes, provided you live a few streets back from the High Street. Green space is a short walk from almost everywhere. Six in ten own their homes. The trains reach Victoria without changing. Most of the crime happens near the tills. Bromley is mostly suburb with a busy shopping town in the middle, and the busy bit is what drags the averages around.
The housing is mostly terraces and flats, though the Bromley people picture is a semi with a drive. On the council-tax valuation list, which covers every home, about 38% are terraced and a third are flats, against 16% semis, 11% detached and 2% bungalows. Around 41% were built before 1930. Of the homes with an energy certificate, about 46% reach band C or better, 41% are band D and 14% are band E or worse. About 81% of homes heat with mains gas, and about 7% rely on electric heating alone. In a converted Edwardian flat, that is the line in the particulars worth asking about.
The Land Registry's figures for the year to May 2026 put the typical sale at about £460,000, across 441 sales. Flats went for about £325,000, terraces £450,000, semis £620,000 and detached houses about £998,000. Band C is the most common council-tax band, and only about 11% of homes fall in bands A or B. Cheap housing in Bromley mostly means a flat.
Renting across the London Borough of Bromley as a whole ran to about £1,670 a month in April 2026, up about 3% on the year, according to the Office for National Statistics' private rent index. The same borough-wide index has a one-bed at about £1,300, a two-bed at £1,630 and a three-bed at £1,975. About 21% of households here rent privately and 18% rent from a council or housing association.
The Metropolitan Police recorded about 118 crimes per 1,000 residents in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, roughly 32% above the average for Bromley borough. The mix shows where it comes from. Shoplifting makes up about 13% of recorded crime here against 8% nationally, and vehicle crime about 10% against 5%. Violence and sexual offences account for about 25%, well below the national share of 35%. The crime map follows the tills.
Ofsted has graded 40 of 41 settings across Bromley borough good or outstanding, 15 of them outstanding. The 13 primary schools in the area averaged a maths score of about 106 at the end of primary school, and the three secondaries averaged an Attainment 8 score of about 47. Bickley Primary School, St George's Bickley and Haberdashers' Knights Primary are among the local primaries, with Bullers Wood School for Boys, Haberdashers' Knights Academy and Bonus Pastor Catholic College at secondary level. When nearly every school is graded good, parents compete on distance from the gate, and house prices follow the tape measure.
Bromley South runs to London Victoria and Blackfriars, Shortlands covers the residential streets to the south west, and Sundridge Park serves the north. Bromley North runs a shuttle to Grove Park and nowhere else, which is a lot of station for one stop. The area has 365 bus stops averaging about 257 departures each on a weekday, and about 99% of them have a weekend service. Gigabit broadband reaches about 86% of premises. At the 2021 census about 42% of workers were at home, 10% took the train and 27% drove, and about 28% of households have no car.
On flooding, about 20% of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood indicator, and surface water counts towards that. The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones are a different measure and tell a calmer story: about 1% of the area is in zone 2 and about half of 1% in zone 3. The agency has 12 recorded flood events, the latest in 1968, when a main river overtopped its channel. The rivers have behaved for decades, and the drains are where the risk is. The Environment Agency's surface-water map will show whether a specific street is one of the wet ones. Green space is the strong suit: the nearest one is about 150 metres away on average, and there are about 28 within a kilometre.
The area has 105 listed buildings: three Grade I, six Grade II* and 96 Grade II, with seven on Historic England's at-risk register. Fourteen conservation areas fall in and around it, including Bromley Town Centre, Bickley Park and Bromley Common. Changing a listed building needs listed building consent, and in a conservation area work like replacement windows or a new front wall can need the council's planners first.
About 60% of households own their home, the median age is about 39, and average gross household income was modelled at about £83,000 in the financial year to March 2023. About 43% of adults have a degree. This page also covers Bickley, Sundridge and Downham, which is over the line in Lewisham. That makes the averages a mix of big Bickley houses and much more ordinary streets.
Bromley suits people who want London commuting with a park at the end of the road and a proper shopping town within walking distance. It suits families who will sort the school admissions paperwork early, and people working from home who want gigabit broadband without moving to a village.
It suits people less well if they want cheap space, because a house with a garden costs a lot here. It also suits people less well if they need to live above the shops and expect the evenings to be peaceful, or if they buy in a low spot without checking the surface-water risk.
The Bishops of Rochester held Bromley Palace from 1185 until 1845, when a merchant called Coles Child bought it and became lord of the manor. The Royal Bell Hotel, just off Market Square, is mentioned in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The railway reached Shortlands in 1858 and turned a rural village into a commuter town. H. G. Wells was born here in 1866. His father founded Bromley Cricket Club, and Wells went on to write about invasions from Mars. The parish church of St Peter and St Paul was largely destroyed by bombing in April 1941 and rebuilt in the 1950s around its medieval tower.
Bromley is a decent place to live as long as you choose the street carefully. Its strength is what surrounds it: green space a couple of minutes from most front doors, plus trains and buses that run all week. The weak spot is flooding, which is mostly about surface water on particular roads, so check the postcode. The busy middle drives the crime figures, and the parks are why people stay.