I presume your FS job is in the City or Canary Wharf, which is why you're looking at inner east London.Bow and Mile End have some decent places, but also a lot of really dodgy places so you need to be sure to see around a few places to get a feel for the area. If you're prepared to look around, prefer to live in a more "real", "urban" or "multicultural" setting, then you can find some nice new-build flats there. For similar, but with more space, you could look at some of the subdivided Victorian houses (not the small terraced houses) out by Stratford or Leyton.If you are looking for somewhere a bit quieter, safer and/or more sanitised then you could look at Canada Water or out along the DLR routes for newly-built flat complexes. It can be a bit dead - which you'll either find peaceful or very boring.I'd also recommend looking along Southbank and near Waterloo. Although most stuff is pretty expensive, and housing is generally in shorter supply, if you can find one of the affordable social housing sublets it's a good deal and excellent for communications.Gumtree is a good place to flathunt as you can usually build up a fairly reliable judgement on the quality of accommodation based on the advert.Although the cheap places are tempting, the reality is that you probably won't find anywhere you'd want to live for an extended period for under £125/wk.A lot depends on where you are working, how long you are prepared to commute for, what kind of area you want to live in and what standard of accommodation you want. For example, there are some really nice places in London to live, but if you're working on the other side of the city, you would be better off actually living outside London in terms of costs, quality of life and accommodation and commuting time.
