Duncton is the sort of place you drive through slowly without quite meaning to — a scatter of houses along the road below the Downs, more hedgerow than pavement, with nothing that could be called a high street. There's no shop to browse, no obvious centre to gravitate toward; the village is a residential thread between Petworth and Chichester, and it attracts people who have already decided they don't want a centre. The numbers behind that impression are telling. With a population barely into the hundreds and a median age around 49, this isn't a place shaped around commuting families so much as settled ones — the sort who bought their freehold terraced or detached house some years ago and have no plans to move. Property here is scarce and expensive: a median sale price of £785,000 sits well above the Chichester district average, let alone the national one, and terraced houses changing hands for that kind of money tells you this is a village market, not a housing market in the usual sense. Schooling is thin on the ground locally — Duncton CofE Junior School serves the immediate area, and families look further out, toward Graffham's Good-rated infant school or the independent Seaford College, for anything beyond the basics. Safety is where Duncton quietly outperforms its own averages — the overall grade sits at a strong B+, but safety alone grades A, and with only a handful of recorded incidents across the year, the "Violence and sexual offences" category that tops the crime breakdown reflects a small base number rather than a real pattern of concern; this is a place where very little happens, and what does gets logged disproportionately by category rather than volume. Transport grades equally well, which is a little surprising for somewhere this rural — there's a workable spread of stops and connections for a village of this size, useful if you're not tied to a car for everything. Green space is present but modest — the grading is solid rather than generous, a handful of small pockets rather than sweeping parkland, in keeping with a place that borders farmland and the Downs rather than manicured public grounds. Day-to-day life here has a rhythm set by geography rather than amenity: no restaurants or pubs of note within the village itself, so eating out, doing the shop, or seeing a GP means a short drive to Petworth or into Chichester. That's the trade-off written into every part of this profile — the affordability grade is strong for what you get given regional prices, the safety and transport grades are excellent, but the housing grade is comparatively lukewarm at C+, the honest acknowledgement that stock is limited, expensive, and doesn't turn over often. This suits people who've already made peace with rural quiet and a car in the driveway — those drawn by seclusion and settled neighbours rather than convenience on the doorstep. It would not suit anyone hoping for a walkable social life or a fast-moving property chain.