Houghton
Village · 1,301 residents
58Good
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: 32 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- Affordability scores 70, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 47% 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
- Transport scores 31, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Houghton
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Houghton a good place to live?
Houghton scores 58/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (85) and affordability (70).
It scores lowest on health (31) and transport (31).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Houghton in East of England, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Houghton
Detached houses behind hedges, gravel drives, the odd thatched roof — Houghton reads as a village where people have generally finished striving and settled in to enjoy the result. There's no high street bustle to speak of; this is a place you drive into rather than stumble across, and the median age north of fifty tells you most of the neighbours aren't rushing anywhere in the morning.
Money-wise, Houghton sits comfortably: it's in the top tier nationally for both income and deprivation deciles, and the median house price runs well above both the Huntingdonshire district figure and the national average — a detached place here will cost you noticeably more than the district norm. Sales are dominated by detached freehold homes, and with six of seven recent sales freehold, this is a village of people who own outright rather than lease. The catch is transport: the grade there lags well behind everything else, so if you need a daily rail commute into Cambridge or London, you'll be driving to find a station rather than stepping onto a platform in the village itself. Houghton Primary School is the only school in the village, a community school with a couple of hundred pupils — fine for the youngest years, but secondary-age children will be travelling out.
Green space is genuinely part of the offer: eight separate patches of it packed into a small footprint, more per head than the regional average, which explains why dog walkers and afternoon strollers outnumber shoppers. There isn't a restaurant scene to speak of in the payload, and healthcare here scores respectably rather than exceptionally — nothing alarming, just ordinary. Crime is where the picture gets interesting: safety grades top of the scale, and the total number of incidents over the year is genuinely low for a settlement of this size, but violence and sexual offences still make up over four in ten of those incidents — the kind of single-category skew you get in a small population where one or two events move the percentages a long way. It's worth knowing about, but it sits against an otherwise very safe backdrop, and the trend is flat rather than worsening.