Issue 1 — a quarterly digest of official figures
The Cottage Price Index
The Land Registry's own house-price figures for England's cottage counties, gathered in one citable place. Issue 1 covers August 2026. The desk adds no estimates of its own.
The figures
| Area | Average price | Detached average | Change on the year |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom (all housing) | £273,037 | £443,846 | +0.9% |
| Cornwall | £274,570 | £419,340 | -2.9% |
| Cumberland (west Lakes) | £172,654 | £286,152 | +4.1% |
| Westmorland and Furness (east Lakes) | £231,161 | £390,474 | +5.1% |
| North Yorkshire (the Dales) | £270,080 | £431,122 | +1.7% |
| Gloucestershire (the Cotswolds) | £318,706 | £520,067 | +0.8% |
| Norfolk | £267,745 | £387,068 | -0.2% |
How to read issue 1
The strongest county on the year is Westmorland and Furness (east Lakes) at +5.1%, and the softest is Cornwall at -2.9%. The UK-wide figure — +0.9% — is the comparison line every county sits against. Detached averages matter for cottage buyers because cottages trade against detached houses, not flats.
These are all-housing figures for each area, not a cottage-only index: the Land Registry does not publish one. That is exactly why the desk shows them plainly instead of dressing them up — see the methodology note below.
Methodology and licence
- Source: HM Land Registry UK House Price Index, August 2026; county figures fetched from the UKHPI linked-data API on 2026-10-31.
- Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The figures are reproduced unaltered; nothing is seasonally adjusted or re-weighted here.
- The HPI covers all housing in each area. A cottage-only index would require a property-type cut the published tables do not provide at county level; where the desk can add one honestly, it will say so and show its working.
- Next issue: the following quarterly release. Updates land on the how we source every figure page with the date they were fetched.
Where to go next
- The sold-price explorer — real transactions by postcode, fetched live.
- Cornwall: the county figures with the character of the stock
- The Lake District: the county figures with the character of the stock
- The Yorkshire Dales: the county figures with the character of the stock
- The Cotswolds: the county figures with the character of the stock
- Norfolk: the county figures with the character of the stock