Relocating to London. The order you do it in matters more than any single decision.

If there are children, the school decides the area, the area decides the house, and the house decides almost nothing else. That sounds obvious and it is routinely done backwards, because a house is the thing you can see photographs of in another country and a school place is not. Families who fall in love with a street in February and then discover that the schools they wanted closed registration the previous summer spend the first year commuting across London twice a day.

If there are no children, the sequence is different and much easier: decide whether your life is west, central, north or east, spend a fortnight renting somewhere central and deliberately temporary, and buy nothing for six months. London rewards that patience more than most cities, because the character of a neighbourhood here changes street by street in a way that no amount of research from abroad will tell you.

This guide covers the parts that people consistently get wrong: how the areas actually differ in daily use, when the school deadlines fall, and how to run viewing days so that you see enough to decide. We arrange the cars that make that fortnight work, and we work regularly with relocation consultants and buying agents, so some of what follows is simply what we watch happen.

For state schools in England the dates are national and fixed. Applications for a secondary place close on 31 October in the year before entry, with offers issued on the first working day of March. Applications for a reception place close on 15 January, with offers on 16 April. A family arriving in November for the following September has already missed the secondary deadline and will be applying in-year, which is a different and less predictable process handled by the local authority.

Independent schools run earlier still and to their own timetables. For entry at eleven, many London day schools close registration in the summer term of Year 5 or the very start of Year 6, with the widely used common pre-test sat between October and December of Year 6 and interviews and written papers in January and February. For entry at thirteen, registration at target senior schools can be years ahead, pre-tests are taken in Year 6 or 7, and conditional offers are made long before the final examinations in Year 8. For any other year group, twelve months ahead is the working minimum.

The practical upshot for an international family is that the school conversation should begin roughly eighteen months before you intend to arrive, and certainly before you look at a single house. If you are already later than that, say so to whoever is advising you, because the honest answer will change which areas are worth looking at at all. Our schools and universities page covers the transport side once places are held, and school transfers covers the run itself.

Driving in central London is charged. A congestion charge applies across the central zone on most days and an ultra low emission zone covers the whole of Greater London, both of which are paid by the vehicle rather than at a barrier, and both of which are simply included in a chauffeured journey. Residents' parking is by permit from the borough, waiting lists exist in the busiest ones, and a house with a garage in the centre of town is a rarity worth paying attention to.

The airports are further apart in time than in distance. Heathrow is straightforward from the west of London and a genuine slog from the east, and the reverse is true of the eastern fields. If somebody in the family will be flying weekly, that fact should be in the area decision, because an hour each way twice a week is a fortnight a year.

And the weather does something to the roads that surprises people from drier cities. The same journey takes half as long again in rain, the first cold morning of the winter is chaos, and a Friday afternoon in December is not comparable to a Tuesday morning in June. Any journey time you are quoted, by us or anybody else, is a range for a reason.