Forest Hill
Village · 409 residents
71Very good
Very good · better than 8 in 10 villages
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 54 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- Environment scores 70, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Road noise reaches 60% of the area
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Forest Hill
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Forest Hill a good place to live?
Forest Hill scores 71/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as very good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (86) and environment (70).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Forest Hill in South East, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Forest Hill
Forest Hill is the kind of place you drive through slowly without meaning to — a scatter of houses rather than a high street, semi-detached and detached homes behind hedges, the sort of spot where you notice the quiet before you notice anything else. It doesn't announce itself. There's no parade of shops to read the area by; you read it instead by the cars on the drives and the fact that everyone seems to know which bin day it is.
This is a small population living well above the national average in terms of affluence — a top-decile deprivation score and an income decile of 8 put it among the better-off corners of the country, though the median house price here sits a little below the wider South Oxfordshire figure, this pocket running about 13.5% under what the district as a whole commands. Housing is dominated by freehold semis and detached homes, no new-build in sight, which tells you this is settled, established stock rather than a developer's recent project — the kind of For Sale board that stays up for a considered sale, not a quick flip. Wheatley Park School serves the secondary-age children locally, an academy with a solidly respectable Progress 8 score, and with a median age of nearly 42, this reads as a place for people well past the first-flat stage of life, often with teenagers rather than toddlers.
Green space is modest in scale — a handful of pockets rather than a sprawling park — but it's not the acreage that defines daily life here so much as the sense of safety underpinning it. Crime is genuinely low in absolute terms, and the safety grade is about as strong as these things get, holding flat rather than drifting either way over time. What stands out, if you look closely, is that almost half of the recorded incidents fall under violence and sexual offences — a striking share against such a small overall count, which is worth knowing even if the raw numbers stay low. Broadband is solid rather than exceptional, with two-thirds of properties on full fibre, enough for home working without any fuss.