Colchester

Colchester reads as a garrison-and-university town that has spread into commuter estates without quite losing its market-town centre — you get Georgian streets and a Roman wall in one direction, and roads of 1990s semis and new-build cul-de-sacs in the other. It's the kind of place where army families, students, and people priced out of London-facing parts of Essex all end up sharing the same high street.

The property picture tells you who's buying: detached houses are the single biggest seller here, most of it freehold, and that mix of solid family homes at a median price of £315,000 — cheaper than the regional median of £360,000 — is what makes Colchester attractive to people trading a London postcode for more space. Flats undersell the national flat price, which suggests the flat market here is smaller and less prized than the house market. On the schools side, Philip Morant School and College and Paxman Academy both carry Good Ofsted ratings and take large numbers of secondary pupils, while Colchester County High School for Girls holds Outstanding status for anyone wanting to aim higher — a fairly normal, unremarkable pattern of solid rather than spectacular results, with both secondaries showing a slightly negative Progress 8 score, worth knowing if academic progress matters more to you than the headline grade. For getting about, the town has genuine rail choice — Colchester Town, Colchester City, the main Colchester station, plus Hythe and Marks Tey on the edges — which matters more than any single line, since it means you're rarely far from a platform wherever you settle.

Green space and daily life follow the same unforced rhythm: this is a town built for pushing a pram round a park at the weekend rather than queuing for a destination restaurant, and the crime pattern backs that read — violence and sexual offences dominate the local breakdown at well over four in ten recorded incidents, well ahead of anti-social behaviour and shoplifting, which is a pattern worth sitting with rather than panicking over, since a lot of it reflects how city-centre nightlife and reporting categories work in a garrison town with a big student and forces population. Burglary and vehicle crime sit much further down the list, which for a family weighing up a street to actually live on is often the more relevant number.