You can get every port gigabit for pretty cheap these days.

At the least get some 24 or 48 port 100Mbit + 2 port 1Gbit so you can uplink them with some reasonable speed. Essentially daisy chain them.

I'd be surprised these days if you couldn't get all Gb on a £3k 48 port switch. Probably not PoE as well though. Something like the HP 2800 or 2810 series. 2900 if you want a faster uplink speed (i.e. 10GBASE-<something>). A 2810-48G is only A$3.3k here or about 1500 pounds. A 2900-48G is only A$5.5k or about 2500 pounds. These are fully managed, VLAN, stacking etc.

I've always had pretty good experiences with HP. And good support too.

Edit: PoE starts getting a bit tricky though with Gbit. In HP they seem to want you to do it as modules.