Bellshill
Town · 19,469 residents
57Good
Good · better than 3 in 10 towns
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- 60% of residents live within five minutes of a park
Check before you view
- Road noise reaches 66% of the area
- Transport scores 31, below the typical 60
- Food & drink scores 34, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Bellshill
Map outline: Official settlement boundary (National Records of Scotland)
Is Bellshill a good place to live?
Bellshill scores 57/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for environment (82).
It scores lowest on transport (31) and food & drink (34).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Bellshill in Scotland, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Bellshill
Bellshill sits in that stretch of North Lanarkshire where old industrial towns have been rebuilt around roundabouts, retail parks and pebble-dashed terraces — a place built for living rather than looking at, with a density of housing that feels more urban than its town status suggests. You won't find boutique cafés lining the main street here; you'll find the kind of practical, unpretentious town centre that serves people who've lived locally for decades alongside younger families taking advantage of prices that are still a fraction of what you'd pay nearer Glasgow.
That affordability is really the headline. A median house price a little over £156,000 places Bellshill among the more affordable towns in Scotland, and it sits in the third decile for deprivation and second for income — meaning this is a place where the cost of living is genuinely low, but so are typical household incomes, and that combination shapes everything else you'll notice, from the shops on the high street to the tone of the place. The five-year trajectory on housing is described as improving, with recent price growth running at a moderate pace — not a boomtown, but not stagnant either. Council tax here undercuts the Scottish median by a noticeable margin, which matters more in a town like this than in wealthier postcodes, where it barely registers.
The town's overall grade lands at a solid B, with connectivity, environment, health and housing all clustered in that same respectable-but-unremarkable band — full-fibre broadband reaches close to two-thirds of properties, which is decent going for a town of this size. Safety carries the best individual grade, a B+, yet it's flagged as worsening over the recent trend, which is worth sitting with: this isn't a town with a crime problem so much as one where a generally safe reputation is under some pressure and moving the wrong way. Nightlife is the one area that dips to a C, which tracks with what you'd expect from a town oriented around family life and daytime routine rather than an evening economy.