Cardiff
City · 362,308 people live here · 61 areas
Check Local Score for Cardiff as a whole: 56, good, better than 2 in 10 cities. 60 is typical for the country.
Summary · written from the figures for Cardiff
Terraced Victorian streets fan out from the centre in long, bay-windowed rows, punctuated by the odd converted flat block and, further out, the semis and detached houses of Whitchurch and Llandaff. It's a city that reads as young and settled at once — students and twenty-somethings around the centre, families a couple of streets further on — and the streetscape shifts noticeably depending on which of Cardiff's many corners you're standing in.
If you commute by train, Llandaff Rail Station and the cluster of stops through Danescourt, Fairwater and Waun-gron Park give this side of the city an unusually dense set of options for a place that still feels residential rather than urban-central. Schools are plentiful rather than famous by name — Whitchurch Primary is the sort of large, well-established community school that anchors a neighbourhood, and Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf reflects the strength of Welsh-medium education here, a distinctive feature of schooling in Cardiff that you won't find replicated in most English cities. On the housing side, terraced houses dominate sales and freehold is the norm, so a For Sale board here is more often than not selling a two-up-two-down with a small yard rather than a leasehold flat — median prices for those terraces run notably above the Welsh average, even if the city's flats remain close to it.
Pick what matters to you and the areas reorder. Choose an area to see why it ranks where it does, then open its report. Or see the report for Cardiff as a whole, with every figure and the map.
What matters to you · pick up to three
Areas ranked overall
Areas are laid out roughly as they sit in Cardiff, north at the top. Scores are out of 100; 60 is typical for the country.
Thornhill
82Ranked 1 of 61 by overall. Strongest on safety (90), weakest on food & drink (29).
Is Cardiff a good place to live?
Cardiff scores 56/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
No topic reaches "very good" (70+); its best is environment (67).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Cardiff in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Cardiff
Terraced Victorian streets fan out from the centre in long, bay-windowed rows, punctuated by the odd converted flat block and, further out, the semis and detached houses of Whitchurch and Llandaff. It's a city that reads as young and settled at once — students and twenty-somethings around the centre, families a couple of streets further on — and the streetscape shifts noticeably depending on which of Cardiff's many corners you're standing in.
If you commute by train, Llandaff Rail Station and the cluster of stops through Danescourt, Fairwater and Waun-gron Park give this side of the city an unusually dense set of options for a place that still feels residential rather than urban-central. Schools are plentiful rather than famous by name — Whitchurch Primary is the sort of large, well-established community school that anchors a neighbourhood, and Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf reflects the strength of Welsh-medium education here, a distinctive feature of schooling in Cardiff that you won't find replicated in most English cities. On the housing side, terraced houses dominate sales and freehold is the norm, so a For Sale board here is more often than not selling a two-up-two-down with a small yard rather than a leasehold flat — median prices for those terraces run notably above the Welsh average, even if the city's flats remain close to it.
Green space is generous for a city of this density — 556 pieces of it, adding up to nearly 1,500 hectares — which shows up in how people spend their spare time: cycling the Taff Trail, dog walking in the parks that ring the suburbs, then finishing at one of the many independent cafés or restaurants that cluster around Whitchurch, Canton or the bay. Healthcare and connectivity both sit comfortably above the Welsh norm, and full-fibre broadband reaches a large majority of homes, which matters if you're weighing up working from home some days and commuting on others. Crime is the one figure worth sitting with: violence and sexual offences account for the largest single share of incidents, and the overall rate sits slightly above the wider Cardiff average — not a dramatic gap, but enough that safety reads as solid rather than exceptional against a backdrop of otherwise strong grades for housing, connectivity and environment.