Garnlydan
Village · 1,001 residents
38Modest
Modest · among the lowest-scoring villages
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 20% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
- Road noise reaches 42% of the area
- Food & drink scores 31, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Map outline: Civil parish boundary
Is Garnlydan a good place to live?
Garnlydan scores 38/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as modest — 60 is typical for the country.
No topic reaches "very good" (70+); its best is property market (66).
It scores lowest on food & drink (31) and schools (33).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Garnlydan in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Garnlydan
Terraces climb the hillside here in long, close-set rows, the kind of streets built for ironworks and coal that still hold their shape a century on. It's a small place — under 1,400 people — and it feels it: quiet, residential, no high street of note, nothing dressed up for visitors.
The numbers behind the streetscape tell a consistent story. This is one of the more deprived corners of Wales by income and by the broader deprivation measure, and the median house price of £135,000 sits well under both the Welsh average and the going rate even within Blaenau Gwent, the council area around it. Yet the safety grade bucks the pattern entirely — top marks, and against a backdrop where you might expect the opposite. Violence and sexual offences make up over a third of recorded crime, which sounds stark until you notice the raw count is small; anti-social behaviour and criminal damage follow at similar, modest levels. Burglary and vehicle crime barely register. It's the kind of place where the crime rate looks worse on a spreadsheet than it feels on the pavement.
Housing here means one thing, essentially: freehold terraces, bought outright rather than leased, with every single sale in the local sample fitting that mould. A "for sale" board on one of these streets is not advertising a new-build flat or a shared-ownership scheme — it's a traditional Valleys terrace, priced roughly £25,000 below the going rate for terraces across Wales, changing hands modestly and rarely rather than churning. Beaufort Hill Primary serves the area's younger children, a community school of a few hundred pupils, though you won't find an Estyn rating attached to it in the way English parents might expect — Wales inspects differently, and results here are read through the Capped 9 score rather than any comparable grading. With a median age of 40, this reads as a settled, working population rather than a transient or heavily retired one; there's no rail station listed for the immediate area, so this is a driving or bus-stop existence — eight transport stops locally — rather than a commuter-belt one.