Cowlinge
Village · 439 residents
64Good
Good · better than 5 in 10 villages
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 48 per 1,000 people a year against 100
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Cowlinge
Map outline: Civil parish boundary
Is Cowlinge a good place to live?
Cowlinge scores 64/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (81).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Cowlinge in East of England, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Cowlinge
Cowlinge announces itself in detached brick and flint houses set well back from the road, the kind of place where a For Sale board tends to be the only sign of activity for an hour at a stretch. There's no high street to speak of, and that's rather the point — this is a working Suffolk village, not a commuter dormitory dressed up as one, and it attracts people who've made peace with driving to get most things done.
The property market here tells you who moves in and why. Sales lean heavily toward detached freehold houses, with barely a new-build in sight, and the median price of £360,000 sits comfortably above both the national figure and West Suffolk as a whole, around 30% higher than the district median. That premium buys space and quiet rather than proximity to a station — there's no rail count to speak of here, so this is a car-based life, with Thurlow Voluntary Controlled Primary School (rated Good) covering the local school-age families and a median age of 43 confirming this is settled, established territory rather than a first-rung-of-the-ladder spot.
Green space is scarce in acreage but not in feel — the two patches recorded amount to well under a hectare between them, which understates the reality of a village surrounded by open Suffolk farmland rather than fenced-off parks; you walk the lanes here, not a designated trail. There's little in the way of restaurants or nightlife on the record, so a night out means getting in the car, and the same goes for anything beyond routine healthcare. What the safety picture does offer is reassuring: an A grade for safety against a national picture where B+ is average, with the crime count low enough that violent and sexual offences — the single largest category — still amount to a small annual number in a village of 546 people, and the trend is flat rather than worsening. The one grade that sits apart from that otherwise strong pattern is environment, at a middling C+, worth a look if air quality, flooding or local environmental factors matter to you specifically.