Brownhills Road

Rows of terraced brick houses dominate here, tight streets built for a working city rather than a commuting one, and the kind of housing stock that sells to first-time buyers and landlords rather than anyone trading up from a semi in the shires. It's a young-ish area by national standards, and everything about the streetscape says Stoke-on-Trent rather than Birmingham commuter belt, even though it sits in the West Midlands region on paper.

The numbers on schooling are genuinely strong for the area's income level — St Mary's Church of England Primary School holds an Outstanding rating, and Saint Nathaniel's Academy and Summerbank Primary Academy both come in as Good, which gives you three solid primary options before you've had to think hard about it. Co-op Academy Stoke-On-Trent covers secondary. Longport Rail Station gives you a line out without needing a car, and with 26 bus stops in the count, getting around locally isn't the issue. The issue is price: a median house price of £87,000 sits at the fifth percentile nationally, and 35.7% below the Stoke-on-Trent average itself, which tells you this is one of the cheapest corners of an already affordable city. Terraced houses dominate sales — 52 of the 83 recent transactions — nearly all freehold, and a For Sale board here is advertising a starter home or a buy-to-let, not a forever house with room to grow.

Green space is reasonably generous for the density — 21 hectares spread across eight sites for a population of around 4,200 — and full fibre broadband reaches most homes, so working from a back bedroom is realistic. What breaks the pattern, and it's worth being straight about this, is safety: everything else about Brownhills Road grades well above the national average, but crime sits at a C+, with violence and sexual offences accounting for a third of all recorded incidents and anti-social behaviour close behind. The crime rate itself runs well above the Stoke-on-Trent average, not just the national one, and that gap doesn't show up anywhere else in the picture — it's the one grade that doesn't match the rest of the report card. The safety trend is holding flat rather than worsening, which is something, but it's not improving either.