Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen
Village · 2,896 residents
57Good
Good · better than 3 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: 61 per 1,000 people a year against 99
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Food & drink scores 35, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen a good place to live?
Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen scores 57/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (74).
It scores lowest on food & drink (35).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen
Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen sits up the Amman valley in a run of terraced streets and pebble-dashed semis, the kind of village where the front doors open straight onto the pavement and everyone still calls it "GCG" for short. It's an old mining and quarrying community, and that history hasn't been sanded off — you can feel it in the compact street plan and the way the hills close in around the houses on both sides.
Housing here is overwhelmingly semi-detached and freehold — of the sample sold recently, semis outnumbered every other type, and freehold ownership ran to roughly nine in every ten sales, which tells you what a For Sale board on this street means: an owned, unremarkable family house rather than something bought to let. Prices reflect that plainness rather than any lack of quality — the median sale sits at £153,000, well under the Welsh average of around £208,000, and semis here trade for tens of thousands less than the same property type elsewhere in Wales. Rent, too, undercuts the national figure. For schooling, families have YGG Gwaun Cae Gurwen and Tairgwaith Primary within the village itself, both small community primaries; secondary-age children and anyone commuting will be looking further down the valley, since there's no rail station listed for the village and the 25 local transport stops point to a bus-first way of getting about rather than a train-line existence.
The green space count — eleven pockets adding up to a modest few hectares — plus a median age of 47, older than the Welsh average of 43, sketches a settled, outdoors-adjacent village rather than a nightlife destination; people here tend to be walking dogs on the hillside paths rather than queuing for restaurants, and the grading for nightlife sits distinctly average rather than a strength. Health, by contrast, is the standout: the area scores among the best in its grading band, worth noting in a place with an older population, and connectivity holds up too, with over seventy per cent of properties on full-fibre broadband — better than you'd expect from the outward simplicity of the streets.