Leith

Walk down Leith Walk and you'll see the pattern quickly: converted tenement flats above bars and coffee shops, scaffolding on some of the sandstone facades, a mix of old dockworkers' pubs and newer places serving flat whites and small plates. It's a suburb that has clearly been through a change of identity in the last couple of decades, and it hasn't quite finished — the energy feels younger than the buildings.

The numbers back up that sense of density and youth. At over 7,000 people per square kilometre, Leith is packed in far tighter than the Scottish average, and a median age of 36.5 — several years younger than the national figure — tells you this isn't a retirement spot. Housing here leans towards flats rather than houses, which fits both the tenement streetscape and a median house price of around £296,000, modestly above the pace of recent national house price growth. The area sits in the lower-middle of Scotland's deprivation deciles on income, which is worth sitting with: this is a place where regeneration and real hardship coexist on the same streets, not a uniformly gentrified postcode.

The grade pattern is where Leith gets interesting. Health and nightlife both score exceptionally well — this is a place with good access to services and a genuine after-dark life, not just a strip of bars for visitors. Connectivity and housing are solidly above average too, and with full fibre reaching the large majority of premises, working from a flat here is a realistic proposition. But safety sits noticeably lower than everything else, and the trend line is described as worsening rather than stable — the one grade that doesn't match the story the rest of the data tells. It's not a alarming figure so much as a genuine outlier, the kind of thing worth asking a local about before you commit to a street.