Havering has been named London’s second most peaceful borough in a study by property specialists.
The study was carried out by SAM Conveyancing, who assessed local authorities using four measures: night-time noise, recorded crime, publicly accessible green space and the distance between homes and nightlife venues.
Each measure was converted into a percentile rank before being combined to create an overall score.
Havering scored 56.5 out of 100 and ranked 123rd among 316 local authorities in England and Wales.
Richmond upon Thames took first place in Greater London, with a score of 58.1, followed by Havering.
Merton, Redbridge and Bromley followed in the ranking.
Havering’s strongest result was for night-time quiet.
It recorded the lowest exposure to road and rail noise among London’s 32 boroughs.
The study said this measure was most important “in the hours when noise is hardest to escape”.
Noise exposure was assessed using 37.7 million address points and national noise grids produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, according to SAM Conveyancing.
Road and rail noise were combined at address level, so people exposed to both types were counted once.
In Havering, 1.41 per cent of residents live within 200 metres of three or more licensed premises, according to the data.
This was the fifth lowest share in London and indicates that fewer homes are close to groups leaving venues at closing time.
The borough also recorded 57.3 offences per 1,000 residents, compared with a national median of 71.1.
Whilst not highlighted directly in the report, Havering has several highly-rated parks and green spaces including Bedfords Park with an average Google rating of 4.7 out of five stars.
Raphael Park also averages 4.7 out of five stars whilst Havering Country Park is rated 4.5 and Eastbrookend Country Park - between Dagenham and Hornchurch - is rated 4.6 out of five.
Andrew Boast, chief executive of SAM Conveyancing, said: “Buyers spend months on the things they can measure – the price, the survey, the school catchment – and almost no time on the thing they will notice on their first night in the house, which is how quiet it actually is.
"A Sunday afternoon viewing tells you very little about what a road sounds like at two in the morning, or what happens when the pub two streets away turns out.
"The encouraging thing is that this is all knowable before you commit.
"What the road carries at night, how close the nearest railway line is, what is licensed within a few hundred metres – that information is public, and it costs nothing to look at.
"Anyone moving home should be asking those questions before they exchange rather than after."
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