Friary Closes
Suburb · 3,088 residents
49Fair
Fair · better than 1 in 10 suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- 7 GP practices within a short walk
- 151 places to eat and drink
- Affordability scores 85, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 18% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Road noise reaches 44% of the area
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Friary Closes
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Friary Closes a good place to live?
Friary Closes scores 49/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for health (95) and food & drink (95).
It scores lowest on safety (8).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Friary Closes in Yorkshire and The Humber, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Friary Closes
Terraced brick streets run close together here, the kind of tight Victorian grid you find ringing a big northern rail town, and the front doors open straight onto pavement rather than garden. It's a working, youngish sort of place — the median age sits well below the national figure — and the housing stock tells you this was built for workers near the station and the town centre, not for anyone chasing space.
That station matters. Doncaster Rail Station serves the area, and with 87 local transport stops feeding into it, getting out to Leeds, Sheffield or down to London isn't the issue — it's one of the few things here that scores unambiguously well, alongside full-fibre broadband reaching over 93% of homes. Schools are thinner on the ground: only two are recorded locally, though Doncaster UTC holds a Good rating and Hall Cross Academy, a large academy converter, posts a solid progress 8 score. Housing itself is remarkably cheap — a median of £80,000 against a national figure of £281,000 puts this firmly among the most affordable pockets in the country, and it's a third cheaper again than the wider Doncaster average. Almost everything sold is freehold terraced stock, the classic "two-up two-down" for sale board, with a handful of semis and barely any flats or new builds in the mix.
Green space is tight — five patches totalling under two hectares, well below what you'd get regionally — so this isn't an area built around parkland weekends; it's a place where life happens on the street and in the town centre rather than the recreation ground. That pattern fits the numbers: this sits in the bottom decile nationally for both income and general deprivation, and the affordability grade (A+) and health grade (A+) sit oddly alongside a safety grade of D — the one grade that breaks the pattern and is worth sitting with. Crime is heavily weighted toward violence and sexual offences, which alone account for a third of all recorded incidents, with shoplifting and anti-social behaviour close behind; the rate itself runs many times higher than the Doncaster average, though it has held flat over recent years rather than worsening.