Stone cottages, low bridges over the Windrush, and a high street built for coach parties rather than commuters — that's the first thing you register in Bourton-on-the-Water. It's a village that visibly runs on visitors, which shapes everything from the tearooms to the traffic on a fine weekend, but step back a street or two and it settles into something quieter and more residential, where the people you pass are walking dogs rather than cameras. The numbers behind the postcard are more interesting than the postcard itself. A median age of 45.7 against a national figure of 40.4 tells you this isn't a village full of young families chasing school catchments — it skews older, settled, established. There are two schools locally, Bourton-on-the-Water Primary School and The Cotswold Academy for secondary, the latter posting a Progress 8 score of 0.49, which is a genuinely strong figure and suggests the education on offer punches above what you'd expect for a place this size. Housing here is dominated by freehold houses — ten detached, ten terraced, eight semis in the recent sales sample — and at a median of £422,475 it actually undercuts the wider Cotswold district by a couple of per cent, even though it sits comfortably above the national median of £281,000. In plain terms: pricier than most of England, but not the most expensive corner of the Cotswolds itself. Green space is modest rather than sprawling — fifteen sites but only around eight hectares in total, so this is a village for riverside walks and pocket parks rather than long country rambles from your doorstep, though the wider Cotswold countryside is what people are usually coming for anyway. Crime sits low in absolute terms, just 44 incidents in the past year, and the safety grading here is about as good as it gets nationally — but violence and sexual offences make up 39% of that small total, which is worth sitting with for a second. In a village this size a handful of incidents can dominate the percentages, so the shape of the number matters more than its size: this reads as an unusually safe place with one category doing the heavy lifting on an otherwise quiet crime sheet. Fibre coverage sits at 66%, decent rather than exceptional, and council tax at Band D of £199 is unremarkable against the national average. This is a village for people who want scenery on the doorstep and don't mind sharing it — retirees, second-home owners, people working remotely who've made peace with the tourist footfall in exchange for the setting. It's less suited to anyone wanting a young, buzzing social scene or a straightforward commuter run, since there's no rail station in the picture here. The trade-off is honest: you get strong schools, low crime, solid property value relative to the district, and a landscape that does a lot of the work for you — in exchange for a place that, for several months of the year, isn't entirely yours alone.