Box
Village · 1,391 residents
66Good
Good · better than 6 in 10 villages
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 40 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- 1 GP practice within a short walk
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Food & drink scores 32, below the typical 60
- Infrastructure scores 39, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Box a good place to live?
Box scores 66/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (85) and health (70).
It scores lowest on food & drink (32) and infrastructure (39).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Box in South West, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Box
Stone terraces climb the hill above the Bybrook, and the honey-coloured cottages that line Box's high street are the same ones you'll have seen on a postcard of this stretch of Wiltshire — this is Bath overspill country, close enough to the city's edges to borrow its architecture without the crowds. The pace here is set by dog walkers and tradesmen's vans rather than commuter crowds, and at 51, the median age tells you this is a settled village, not a starter-home suburb.
The practical picture is straightforward rather than spectacular. There's one school in the immediate count, Box Church of England Primary, rated Good and modest in size at 146 pupils — the kind of school where a newcomer's child is known by name within a term. Wiltshire's wider rail and road network puts Bath and Chippenham within reach, though Box itself isn't built around a station; the transport grade here (among the strongest in the country) rests more on road connectivity and bus stops than trains. Housing is dominated by semi-detached and detached homes sold freehold — the kind of For Sale board that says "family house, own it outright, no chain of leasehold complications." At a median of £480,000, sitting well above both the Wiltshire and national medians, this is a place you buy into rather than drift into, and detached homes here fetch well over the national going rate for the type.
Green space is modest in scale — seven pockets amounting to just over six hectares — but for a village of under 200 people that's still generous per head, enough for a proper afternoon walk without leaving the parish. Health outcomes here are exceptional against the national picture, and the general safety grade matches it: this is a genuinely low-crime corner of England, even though the raw crime-rate comparison against Wiltshire as a whole looks alarming on paper. That figure is a statistical quirk of a tiny population base — seven incidents in a year, mostly the sort of low-level disorder any village sees, not a sign of a place with a problem. It's the one number in this profile that needs translating rather than trusting at face value.