Most people arrive at this decision the wrong way round. They choose a board they like in a showroom, then find out what their flat will actually accept. In Central London that order costs money, because the constraints here are unusually tight: concrete slabs in post-war blocks, springy Victorian joists in conversions, doors that already sit low, a flat below that will hear everything, and a lease that may have opinions about all of it. The honest answer to engineered versus solid is that the building usually decides, and your taste operates within what it allows.
What the two things actually are
Solid wood is what it sounds like: a board milled from one piece of timber, top to bottom, usually tongued and grooved. It is all wearing surface, so it can in principle be sanded back several times over a long life.
Engineered wood is a layered board. A real hardwood wear layer sits on top of a cross-bonded plywood or timber core. The visible surface is genuine wood of the species you chose, so it is not laminate and it is not a photograph. The difference is what sits underneath. Because the core layers run in alternating directions, the board resists the seasonal swelling and shrinking that a solid plank does across its width. That single property is why engineered dominates flat refurbishment in London.
The variable that matters most in engineered board, and the one that is easiest to gloss over when comparing prices, is the thickness of the wear layer. A thick wear layer can be sanded and refinished more than once. A very thin one is a one-life floor: once it is worn through, it is replaced rather than restored. Two boards can look identical on the day they are laid and have completely different futures. When you compare quotes, compare wear layers, not just species and finish.
The subfloor is the real question
Before anything else, find out what you are laying on. In Central London it is nearly always one of two things, and they push in opposite directions.
Concrete slabs
Post-war blocks, purpose-built mansion-block rebuilds, and the newer apartment stock around Paddington Basin generally sit on concrete. Concrete is stable, but it holds and releases moisture, and it is very rarely as flat as it looks. Solid wood cannot simply be glued or laid onto a slab and left to behave; it wants to move, and the slab will not let it. Engineered board, either bonded down or floated over a suitable underlay, handles this far better. On a slab, engineered is usually the sensible answer rather than a compromise.
Timber joists and period boards
Conversions and mansion blocks across Marylebone, Bayswater and Maida Vale typically have timber floors: joists, original boards, and a century of alterations. Here you have more freedom, but two new problems. The first is level. Period floors dip, sag towards load-bearing walls, and step where earlier work has patched them. The second is deflection: the floor moves underfoot, and any rigid finish laid over a bouncing deck will eventually complain at the joints. Both are solvable with proper preparation, but preparation is work, and work is cost. Anyone who quotes a floor without asking what is under the existing one is guessing.
Height: the constraint nobody measures early enough
This is where flat projects go wrong most often. Your new floor is not just the board. It is the board, plus any acoustic layer, plus any levelling compound or ply overlay, plus adhesive. Add those together and you have a build-up that has to be absorbed somewhere.
In a period flat there is often nowhere for it to go. Internal doors already sit close to the existing floor. Skirting details, architraves and the bottoms of door linings were set out for the floor that is there now. Thresholds into bathrooms and kitchens have to remain safe and level. Raise the floor by a couple of centimetres and you may be easing every door in the flat, refitting thresholds, and looking at a skirting line that suddenly reads wrong. Engineered boards come in thinner formats than solid, which is frequently the deciding factor once an acoustic layer is in the stack. Measure the build-up before you order anything.
Underfloor heating and moisture
If there is underfloor heating, engineered is generally the appropriate choice, and you should be checking the specific board against what the heating manufacturer and the flooring manufacturer both allow. Solid wood over a heated screed is a fight between the timber and the heat cycle, and the timber tends to lose. Species matters too: some are markedly more stable than others, and a floor fitter who works with heated floors will steer you.
Moisture is the other half of this. Basement and lower-ground flats in Little Venice and Bayswater are frequently damper than their owners believe, and a new slab or fresh screed retains construction moisture for a long time. A proper fitter tests before laying rather than trusting the calendar. Skipping that test is the single most common cause of a wood floor cupping or lifting a year later, and it is entirely avoidable.
Read your lease before you read a brochure
This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth being blunt. In many Central London leases, hard floor finishes in a flat are restricted, and some leases require carpet over a stated proportion of the floor, or an acoustic layer to a specified standard, or the freeholder's written consent before any change of finish. These clauses vary enormously from block to block and even between flats in the same building, so nothing you read online is a substitute for reading your own lease and speaking to your managing agent.
Do that first. We cover the mechanics in detail in our guides to floor noise rules in mansion blocks and acoustic underlay requirements for flats. Where consent is needed, it may form part of a wider licence to alter. Getting agreement in advance is straightforward paperwork. Getting it retrospectively, after the flat below has complained about a floor already glued down, is the expensive path, and in the worst cases it ends with the floor coming back up.
How long each one lasts
The usual argument for solid is longevity: it is thick, so it can be sanded repeatedly across decades. That is genuinely true, and it is why so much original parquet and pine board in W1 and W9 is still serviceable after a hundred years. If you have an original floor, restoring it is often better than replacing it, and worth reading our guide to parquet restoration before you commit to anything new.
For a new floor, though, the comparison is narrower than the marketing suggests. A quality engineered board with a generous wear layer can be refinished more than once, which is more sanding cycles than most floors ever actually receive. Very few domestic floors are sanded as many times as a solid board theoretically permits. What usually ends a floor is water, a change of taste, or a full refurbishment, not exhausted timber.
Species, finish and how the floor sounds
Species affects hardness, stability and price, and it interacts with everything above. A softer timber will mark more readily in a hallway that takes traffic; a harder one is less forgiving to cut and fit around the irregular walls you find in period rooms. Oak dominates the London market for good reasons, but the width and length of the board matter as much as the species. Wide, long boards look calm and expensive and are less tolerant of an uneven subfloor, because a long plank bridges dips instead of following them. On a wavy period floor, a narrower board hides sins that a wide one advertises.
Finish is a separate decision from construction, and you can have either finish on either board. Factory-finished boards arrive sealed and are walked on almost immediately, which matters in an occupied flat where you cannot vacate for a week. Site-finished floors are sanded and sealed in place, which gives a seamless surface with no micro-bevel between boards and lets you match an existing floor exactly, but it means sanding dust and drying time in your home. In a block with restricted hours and neighbours on both sides, that trade-off is a scheduling question as much as an aesthetic one.
Then there is how the floor sounds. Any hard floor is louder underfoot than what it replaced, and a floated floor over an underlay can read slightly hollow if the build-up is wrong or the subfloor is not flat. A bonded floor generally feels more solid underfoot. This is worth thinking about early, because the acoustic layer your lease may require also changes the feel of the finished floor, not just what the flat below hears.
Where solid still makes sense
Solid remains a good answer on a sound, dry, well-supported timber floor, at ground or upper level, with no underfloor heating, no significant height constraint, and no lease clause pushing you elsewhere. In a townhouse where you control the whole building, or where you are matching into existing solid boards, it is often the right call. The point is not that engineered is better. It is that the conditions solid needs are less common in a Central London flat than people assume.
What to ask before you order
Ask what the subfloor is and whether it has been tested for moisture and level. Ask for the wear-layer thickness in millimetres, not a grade name. Ask what the total build-up height is, including any acoustic layer, and what that does to your doors and thresholds. Ask whether the floor is being bonded, floated or secret-nailed, and why that method suits your subfloor. Ask what the lease says and who is confirming it. Ask how much of the price is preparation, because on a period floor that can be a large share of the job and it is the part people forget to compare.
Finally, ask about the practical side of working in an occupied block: how the lift and communal parts will be protected, whether the porter needs deliveries booked in, and what the permitted working hours are. Boards arrive in long, heavy packs, and blocks in Westminster commonly restrict noisy work to set hours, which is covered in our guide to working hours restrictions.
How we approach it
We look at the subfloor before recommending a board, not after. We check the height stack against your doors and thresholds, and we ask what your lease requires before anything is ordered. Our wood flooring work starts from £30/m², published openly, and where a floor needs preparation or forms part of a wider refurbishment we give you a fixed quote before we start rather than a day rate and a shrug. One point of contact, tidy protection in the communal parts, and the flat left clean.