Alum Chine

Alum Chine is chine and clifftop rather than high street — low-rise blocks of flats, private balconies angled toward the sea, cars with roof boxes parked outside for exactly one weekend a year. It reads as a place people retire to or buy a second home in rather than a place anyone commutes out of at 7am, and the numbers back that impression up: a median age pushing 54 against a national figure of 40 tells you this is a settled, older population, not a starter-home suburb.

The property market says the same thing twice over. Nearly four in five sales here are flats, most of them leasehold, and the median flat price of £330,000 is well above the national flat median of £215,000 — this is coastal-view pricing, not commuter-belt pricing. The handful of detached houses that do sell go for well over a million, which skews the headline figures but also tells you those properties are rare and sit at the very top of the local market. A For Sale board on this street is almost always advertising a leasehold flat with a sea aspect, not a family semi with a garden — there's essentially no new-build stock and very little turnover, so what's here tends to stay in private hands a long time.

Green space is genuinely part of daily life, even if there's only one named area of it — Alum Chine itself, the wooded ravine running down to the beach, at just over three hectares. It's compact, but it's the kind of space you use rather than admire from a bench: dog walkers, joggers, people cutting through to the sand. There's no cluster of restaurants or a high street food scene to speak of in the data, which fits the residential, low-density character rather than contradicting it — this isn't a place you come to for a night out, it's a place you come home to. Health is rated solidly rather than exceptionally, which for an older population is worth noting as you weigh things up.