The Huddersfield Monopoly Board

Board games seem a thing of the past for youngsters nowadays with their consoles and mobile phones yet a family favourite in our household that will bring young and old together is Monopoly.

Mayfair is the square everyone wants to buy and whilst it is the most expensive to buy – it offers the greatest returns. Mayfair was the must have London address when the Monopoly board game was made in 1935 when, at the time, it was the most expensive street to buy houses at £400 each. A member of my family asked me what a property today would be worth in Mayfair and how much it would cost to buy them all. Readers will know I like a challenge. My research shows that a typical house in Mayfair today costs on average £2.8m - whilst the total value of all the property in the Mayfair area currently stands at £11.8bn.

The fun part of Monopoly was to build more houses and ultimately a hotel to extract the maximum rent from the other players who landed on the square. That made me think, instead of looking at the average value of a property on the street, what if we looked at the total value of property on the whole street. So, I carried out some research on all the 327 streets in HD1 and calculated the top 20 streets in terms of their total value of all properties on the street..  and just for fun, colour coded them as if they were on a Monopoly board  …

Monopoly Board Street	Huddersfield (HD1) Equivalent Street	Total Value of all the Homes on the Street
Mayfair	Firth Street	£64,804,000
Park Lane	Kings Mill Lane	£33,263,000
Bond Street	St Johns Road	£26,386,000
Oxford Street	Broomfield Road	£24,923,000
Regent Street	New North Road	£24,264,000
Piccadilly	Trinity Street	£23,442,000
Coventry Street	Oldgate	£20,328,000
Leicester Square	Church Street	£20,252,000
Trafalgar Square	Mountjoy Road	£19,775,000
Fleet Street	Heaton Road	£19,461,000
The Strand	Luck Lane	£19,263,000
Vine Street	Bradford Road	£19,223,000
Bow Street	Gledholt Road	£18,915,000
Pall Mall	Cleveland Road	£18,856,000
Whitehall	Kings Bridge Road	£17,702,000
Northumberland Ave	Grasmere Road	£16,835,000
Pentonville Road	Springwood Hall Gardens	£16,198,000
Angel Islington	Water Street	£15,018,000
White Chapel Road	Victoria Road	£14,489,000
Old Kent Road	Greenhead Road	£14,349,000

Mayfair and Park Lane are represented by Firth Street and Kings Mill Lane. Surprises in the mix include Broomfield Road and Oldgate. They are rightly in the list because of the sheer size of those streets; because whilst the value of those homes are much lower than the posher streets, the total value of the whole street means they make the top 20 list.

Now of course whilst drawing a comparison between a 1935 board game and the actual total house values on those Huddersfield streets and roads provides a light hearted point of view of the Huddersfield property market, it does present a credible picture of Huddersfield’s most popular streets. Next time I will get back to writing an article with a little more seriousness and deeper issues on the Huddersfield housing market … but this week, I hope you enjoyed my little bit of fun!