East Budleigh

Redbrick cottages, a thatched roof or two, a scatter of detached houses on generous plots — East Budleigh reads as the kind of village where the church tower is still the tallest thing around. There's no rush to it. The people you'll pass on the street skew well older than the national average, and the place has the settled, unhurried air of somewhere most people have lived for decades rather than years.

There's one school in the village itself, Drake's Church of England Primary, a small academy with just over forty pupils — the sort of school where the head probably knows every child by name, though its Ofsted rating isn't listed, so you'd want to visit and judge for yourself. Housing here is overwhelmingly detached and freehold, with a median sale price around £475,000, comfortably above both the East Devon district figure and the regional and national medians; this is not a place buying in on a budget, and the sample of recent sales is small enough that any single house sale moves the average. Rents sit a touch below the national median, which is one of the rare figures here that doesn't scream premium. With ten transport stops in the village but no rail station of its own, this reads as a driving village more than a commuter one — the kind of place you settle into rather than pass through on the way to somewhere else.

Green space is modest in scale — around three and a half hectares across four sites — small enough that you'll get to know every path and bench rather than discover something new each weekend. There isn't a long list of restaurants or cafés here, so eating out tends to mean a drive rather than a stroll. Full-fibre broadband reaches a healthy majority of homes, which matters more than it once did if you're working from that spare room rather than commuting anywhere. The overall grade sits at the top of the scale, and safety in particular is rated exceptionally well — sensible, given the raw crime count over the past year was in the single digits, made up mostly of violence and anti-social behaviour categories that in a village this size can mean one or two incidents rather than a pattern. Worth noting that the trend on safety is marked as worsening even from that low base, which is the one loose thread in an otherwise calm picture — not alarming, but worth a second look rather than dismissing outright.