Letchworth

Letchworth has a particular look to it — the world's first garden city, laid out with wide verges, Arts and Crafts cottages and tree-lined avenues that still shape how the town feels when you walk through it. The town centre is low-rise and orderly rather than showy, and the people drifting between the independent shops and the chain cafés tend to be a mix of long-settled residents and the sort of commuter household that wanted Hertfordshire green without the price tag of the villages further south.

On that last point, the trade-off is real. North Hertfordshire as a whole sits around the £405k mark for a typical home, and Letchworth generally comes in gentler than that — a draw for anyone priced out of Hitchin or Harpenden but still wanting the fast line into London. It is pricier than the English average, but by East of England standards it reads as one of the more accessible footholds in the county, which is why you see a steady churn of younger families moving in from further down the line.

Day to day, the garden city bones do a lot of the work. There are generous commons and greens threaded through the residential streets, so a weekend walk rarely requires getting in the car, and the town centre carries enough independent food and drink to keep a Saturday ticking over without feeling like a day out has to be planned. It is quieter in the evenings than somewhere like Stevenage next door — that is either the appeal or the drawback, depending on your temperament.

One thing worth flagging if you're weighing up the next few years: there are a handful of brownfield sites inside the town with planning permission, each in the fifty-to-ninety home range. Nothing transformative, but it does mean some infill building is on the cards rather than hypothetical. If you end up viewing somewhere adjacent to one of those plots, it's worth asking the agent directly.