High Lee

High Lee reads as a small, quiet pocket of terraces and flats rather than a high street you'd recognise by name — this is a place people live rather than pass through, and at barely 150 residents packed into a fairly dense patch of streets, it feels more like a close-knit corner of a bigger town than a suburb in its own right.

The numbers back up that impression of comfort without flash. An affordability grade and safety grade both sitting at the top of the scale suggest a place where money worries and crime worries aren't what keep residents up at night, and the "improving" trend on safety is the kind of quiet good news that matters more than a headline crime figure. Look closer at that crime figure, though, and there's the one grade that doesn't quite fit the pattern: violence and sexual offences account for close to half of all recorded incidents, which is worth sitting with even though the raw count stays low. Housing here leans towards flats held on leasehold, with the odd detached or semi-detached house appearing more rarely — the kind of mix you'd expect from a converted or subdivided older building stock rather than a modern estate, and with only a handful of sales to go on, prices swing wildly between one end of the market and the other. Against High Peak, the district it sits within, property here comes in notably cheaper — housing decile and income decile both sit comfortably above average nationally, so this reads as a place where residents are reasonably well-off even though the homes themselves are priced well below what you'd pay elsewhere in the district.