Harold Wood
Neighbourhood · 13,477 residents
70Very good
Very good · better than 8 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
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 65 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- Environment scores 75, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Road noise reaches 40% of the area
- Food & drink scores 38, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Harold Wood
Map outline: Approximate — electoral ward boundary, used as the nearest surveyed shape
Is Harold Wood a good place to live?
Harold Wood scores 70/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as very good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (76) and environment (75).
It scores lowest on food & drink (38).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Harold Wood in London, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Harold Wood
Harold Wood reads as pebble-dashed semis and post-war terraces, the kind of streets where a Ford sits on the drive next to a trampoline and nobody's in a rush. It's outer-London suburbia in the fullest sense — not the flat-conversion churn of zone 2, but a settled, family-shaped place that happens to have a station into the city.
That station does a lot of the work here. Harold Wood Station puts this squarely in commuter territory, and with a median age of 36 you're looking at a working population rather than a retirement pocket or a student enclave — people who bought here precisely because the train exists and the postcode still feels like a proper suburb. Schools follow the same pattern: Mead Primary and Broadford Primary are both rated Good, and the secondary offer includes Drapers' Academy, so a family moving here isn't gambling on education even if outstanding grades aren't the headline. On the street, what you'll actually see for sale is a semi or terrace, sold freehold — the market here is 114 freehold sales against 34 leasehold, and semis fetch £450,000 against a national semi median of £273,000, which tells you this is a place people buy into rather than pass through. Against the wider borough of Havering, prices are actually 5.7% softer, so you're not paying the Havering premium for the Harold Wood name, even though Havering's own crime rate sits well above what's recorded locally.
Green space comes in reasonably generous parcels — twelve separate spaces adding up to over 30 hectares, more breathing room per head than the London average — and that shapes the rhythm of the place: dog walks and football kickabouts rather than café culture. There's no long restaurant list to point to here, so this isn't an area that pulls people in for its eating-out scene; it's a place you come home to rather than out to. The borough-wide health picture and the overall grade of B point to a place that functions well on the basics — connectivity, environment, transport all sit at B+ or B — without excelling in any single direction hard enough to headline it.