Farmington

Farmington is the kind of place where the houses do the talking: honey-coloured stone, mostly detached, and barely a rendered semi in sight. With a population you could fit in a large village hall, this is Cotswold stone country rather than commuter-belt suburbia, and the streetscape tells you that before any statistic does.

The numbers back up the first impression. This sits in the ninth income decile nationally, though the wider deprivation picture is more middling, and the property market makes the point bluntly — sales here run to a median of over a million pounds, well above even the Cotswold district average, which is itself already pricier than most of England. Every sale in the local sample was freehold, dominated by detached houses, which is what you'd expect for a village where the housing stock is old, solid, and rarely turns over. Schools are a short list rather than a long one: Sherborne Church of England Primary carries a Good rating, while the tiny Southrop CE Primary, with under forty pupils, has been told it requires improvement — a reminder that "village school" can mean brilliant or borderline depending on which one your children end up walking into.

Day-to-day life here is unhurried by design. Green space is modest in area but present, and with only seven transport stops serving the village, this isn't a place built around a station platform — you'd be driving to most things, including a restaurant on a night out, since none are recorded within the village itself. The median resident is in their early fifties, well above the national average age, which fits a village that reads more retirement and second-home territory than young family enclave. The crime picture is genuinely low in raw terms, arson and criminal damage the top category from a small annual total, and the safety grade sits at the very top of the scale with the trend holding flat — reassuring, though worth noting alongside a housing grade that lags behind everything else on offer, a C+ against a run of As and B+s elsewhere. That's the one grade that doesn't match the postcard: not a safety concern, but a signal that the affordability and availability of homes here is the real constraint, not the quality of life once you're in one.