Exeter

Terraced streets ripple out from the centre in that particular Exeter mix of Victorian brick and university-town scruffiness, with independent shops and cafés threading between them rather than chain frontages — the kind of high street that still feels like a going concern rather than a museum piece. It attracts a younger crowd than you'd expect of a cathedral city, students and young professionals filling out the terraces before, if they stay, trading up to something with a garden on the fringes.

Getting around is one of the area's quiet strengths: five rail stations serve the city, including St James Park and Exeter Central, so you're rarely far from a platform whatever corner you land in. Schools are more mixed — with 53 schools in the mix but an average Ofsted rating hovering around "good" rather than comfortably above it, and Wynstream Primary flagged as requiring improvement, this is a city where you'll want to check the specific catchment rather than assume the city-wide average applies to your street. Housing leans terraced and freehold — of 727 recent sales, terraces outnumbered every other type, and freehold ownership dominates by a wide margin over leasehold — which reads on the ground as small Victorian and Edwardian houses sold outright rather than the flat-and-lease stock you'd find in a bigger city. At a median of £300,000, against a national figure of £281,000 and a similar regional one, Exeter isn't cheap for the South West, but it isn't in London-adjacent territory either — a decile 6 for deprivation puts it just on the comfortable side of average nationally.