Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmunds still looks like a market town that never quite decided to become a city — Georgian and medieval frontages along the main streets, a cattle-market-turned-shopping-centre feel to the middle of it, and enough independent shops and pubs to give the centre a proper social pulse in the evenings. It draws a mix you'd expect from a place with a median age a few years above the national norm: retirees who've downsized from surrounding villages, families who grew up locally and stayed, and a steady trickle of commuters priced out of Cambridge looking for something with more character for the money.

The practical picture is a town that works well if you don't need to be in London every day. There's one rail station serving the town, which keeps things simple rather than giving you options — fine if your commute is Cambridge or Ipswich, less fine if you need frequent fast trains south. Schools are a mixed bag rather than a clean story: Westgate Community Primary carries a Good rating, but the average across the town's 23 schools sits close to the national mean rather than above it, and King Edward VI's secondary progress score sits slightly negative, so this isn't a town where every gate has an Outstanding sign on it — you'd want to check the individual school rather than assume. Housing leans toward terraces and freehold ownership (there's a lot more freehold than leasehold on the ground here), and at a median of around £280,000, prices sit almost exactly on the national median, itself a fraction below what the wider West Suffolk district commands — so a For Sale board here reads as fair value rather than a bargain or a stretch.