What will £600,000 buy you in the UK property market?

This Doncaster property is billed as The Cottage, but there’s nothing dinky about this six-bedroom pile in three-quarters of an acre in Ed Miliband’s constituency of South Yorkshire. While close family can slum it in the sitting room, guests can be formally hosted in the drawing room. A study and an office allow you to earn your living away from distraction so you can get on with repaying that mortgage. Yours for £600,000.
Fine and Country Photograph: Fine and Country

A Grade II-listed house in Gwynedd. For £595,000 you get 28 acres of Snowdonia national park with a six-bedroom Elizabethan manor house, a one-bedroom annexe and two three-bedroom cottages thrown in for free. Stained glass, Elizabethan panelling and moulded ceilings, dramatic fireplaces and those little essentials like a butler’s room and two minstrels' galleries survive.
Jackson-Stops Photograph: Jackson-Stops

This 17th century house in Ludlow, Shropshire sent the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner into ecstasies, because even by the standards of the handsome market town, the building is a craftsman’s masterpiece. Its intricate panellings, mouldings and carvings have been rescued from pending dereliction by a programme of renovation, which has left the four bedrooms and three receptions newly wired, plumbed and piped. Given the extent of the new kitchen-breakfast room you could harness the utility room as a study overlooking the garden. On the market for £599,000.
Strutt and Parker Photograph: Strutt and Parker

Getting a foothold in the London property market is an expensive business, especially when you have status to maintain, so why not get the taxpayer to help you achieve one of the capital's premier postcodes. This two-bedroom flat in a mansion block in W2 is a few minutes stroll from Hyde Park and Oxford Street. At £600,000, it almost counts as cheap given the location and the decent room sizes (bar the Lilliputian kitchen), but that's because the fittings and decor need modernising.
West End Residence Photograph: West End Residence

This £600,000 barn conversion near Norwich, Norfolk, may leave you feeling that only four double bedrooms and three receptions cramp your style, and it’s a blow that the government won’t help you convert the outbuildings into something more palatial. The comfort is that it is stylish and sizeable, with the main bathroom dwarfing most people’s living rooms.
Abbotts Photograph: Abbotts