Bournemouth

Bournemouth's centre reads like a town that never quite decided whether it's a seaside retreat or a proper city — big Victorian villas carved into flats near the clifftops, student houses filtering into HMOs around the university end, and a high street doing the usual mix of chain coffee and charity shops with surfwear thrown in. It's dense for a town this size, and that density shows in the mix of people you pass: retirees who came for the sea air decades ago, younger renters drawn by the flats and the nightlife, families further out in the quieter streets. The place feels lived-in rather than dressed up for visitors, even with the beach on the doorstep.

Getting around is where Bournemouth quietly earns its keep. Bournemouth Rail Station anchors the town, with Pokesdown and Branksome giving you two more options depending on which side of town you land, and the transport grade sits comfortably above average. Schools are a genuine strength rather than a footnote — Bournemouth School and Bournemouth School for Girls both carry Outstanding ratings with strong progress scores, and Avonwood Primary School is the named Outstanding option on the primary side, so a family here isn't gambling on secondary places the way they might elsewhere. Housing itself splits along a fault line: flats dominate the sales figures and freehold slightly outnumbers leasehold overall, but that freehold share is mostly propping up the detached and semi-detached end of the market — a flat here typically comes leasehold, a house typically doesn't. Prices sit a little under the wider Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area, and the five-year direction on housing is described as improving even though the most recent year's growth has been modest.