Cassington

Stone cottages, a handful of farmhouses converted into detached family homes, and a village green that hasn't needed much more than a church and a primary school for as long as anyone can remember — that's Cassington in a glance. It's small enough that you notice a new car on the street, and the kind of place where the population rounds to under a hundred, not because it's dying but because it was never built to be bigger.

The housing stock tells you most of what you need to know about who ends up here: detached houses on freehold titles dominate the handful of sales each year, with a median price around £420,000 — a touch below the West Oxfordshire average despite sitting comfortably among the better-off villages nationally (this is a top-decile spot for both income and general deprivation terms, which locals feel more as "quiet money" than visible wealth). There's no new-build estate pulling in young commuter families here; this is a village of people staying put, reflected in a median age pushing 48 and a tiny, slow-turning property market — just seven sales recorded recently, turning over at less than half the national rate. The one school, St Peter's Church of England Primary, is the anchor for any family that is here, an academy with under a hundred pupils rather than a big feeder school — fine if you want your child to know everyone in their class, less so if you want league-table choice. Oxford's commuter routes are within reach by road rather than rail directly from the village, and that absence of a local station is itself the tell: this is a drive-to-the-platform sort of place, not a walk-to-the-train one.