Balsall Heath

Balsall Heath reads as terraced streets end to end, Victorian bay windows mixed in with halal butchers, sari shops and corner mosques, the kind of high street that never quite stops moving even if it never quite sparkles either. It's dense — properly dense, well above what you'd find in most of the country — and young, with a median age in the early thirties that shows in the pushchairs, the shisha cafés and the steady churn of students and new arrivals finding their feet before moving on or staying put.

The schools are the quiet surprise here. With an average Ofsted rating sitting at the top of the scale, places like SS John and Monica Catholic Primary and the Ark Tindal Primary Academy anchor a schooling offer that punches well above what the area's economic standing would suggest, and Jakeman Nursery School carries an Outstanding rating in its own right. Transport is the flip side of that story — the area's connectivity grade is solid but transport itself lags, a reminder that this is a walk-and-bus suburb rather than a rail commuter's shortcut into central Birmingham. Housing is cheap by comparison: a terraced freehold, which is what the vast majority of sales here actually are, carries a median price some way under both the regional and national terraced averages, and noticeably below the Birmingham-wide figure too. The five-year direction on prices is improving, even if the last year alone was close to flat.