Bean sits just off the Dartford sprawl but doesn't feel like an extension of it — a small cluster of semi-detached homes, a single primary school, and not much else in the way of high street. This is a place people land in rather than discover; there's no parade of shops to browse, no pub-on-every-corner buzz. It reads as residential and quiet, the kind of village where you'd recognise your neighbours' cars before you'd recognise their faces. The practical picture is modest but coherent. Bean Primary School is rated Good and, with 209 pupils, is clearly the anchor of family life here — there isn't a second school to weigh it against, so if you have children, this is the school you're choosing into. With a median age of 41.7, slightly older than both the regional and national averages, this reads less like a starter-home village and more like a place people settle into for the long haul, often after the school-run years rather than during them. Transport is workable rather than a headline: eight stops serve the village, but there's no rail station named here, so anyone commuting by train is looking beyond the village boundary. Housing is unambiguous — every recorded sale is freehold, and semi-detached homes dominate six to one over detached, so a for-sale board here almost always means a solid, unshowy family semi rather than a flat or a new-build estate. Green space is tight rather than generous — five pockets totalling under a couple of hectares, well below the regional norm per head, so this isn't a village built around sprawling parkland; it's gardens and modest local plots rather than a country walk on the doorstep. Health outcomes and the general environment both score well against the national picture, which fits the quiet, settled feel. Crime is where the pattern gets interesting: the overall safety grade is solid, and the borough-wide trend is flat, but violence and sexual offences make up over 40% of recorded incidents, well ahead of anti-social behaviour and criminal damage combined. For a village of 230 people, the raw numbers are small, but that concentration in one category is the sort of thing worth sitting with rather than skimming past. On value, Bean is a stride above its own district — house prices here run a little over 10% higher than the Dartford average, and the semi-detached median sits comfortably above the national figure for the same property type. It's not cheap, but it's not chasing London-commuter prices either; it's a village that's quietly done well without shouting about it. This suits people who've already decided they want stillness over stimulation — good schooling for the one age group it serves, freehold security, and a level of quiet that shows up in the data as much as in the streets. It won't suit anyone hoping for nightlife, choice of schools, or a station at the end of the road, and the crime mix is worth a closer look before you commit rather than after.