Cwmgelli

Cwmgelli doesn't announce itself. It's the kind of place where semi-detached houses sit quietly behind hedges, cars are older and well-kept, and the average person you pass has lived through a few decades of the street changing slowly around them — the median age here is late fifties, well above the Welsh average, and it shows in the unhurried, settled feel of the place rather than in any particular building or junction.

The housing stock tells you what kind of street this is: mostly semi-detached, entirely freehold, no new-build estates creeping in at the edges. A For Sale board here is selling a family house someone has owned outright for years, not a starter flat or a buy-to-let unit — and at a median price close to £190,000, sitting almost exactly level with the wider Caerphilly borough, it's not a place people are flipping for profit. It's a place people stay.

That stability is backed up by the numbers on safety, which is really the spine of this piece. Cwmgelli's overall standing is about as good as it gets — comfortably among the less deprived tenth of Wales on both income and general deprivation — and the safety grade sits at the very top of the scale. Yet the crime figures underneath show violence and sexual offences making up nearly half of the (small) number of incidents logged, and the borough-wide comparison shows the local rate running more than double Caerphilly's average. That's an odd pairing — a top-tier safety grade next to a crime mix skewed hard toward one category — and it's worth sitting with rather than glossing over. In absolute terms the numbers are tiny, which is exactly why a handful of incidents can swing the percentages so sharply; it's not a place that reads as unsafe day to day, but it's not spotless either.