Llanelli

Terraced streets run down toward the water here, red-brick and pebble-dashed rows that speak of a working town rather than a commuter dormitory, and the shopfronts along the main streets mix the practical with the tired — bookmakers next to bakeries, a few units shuttered. This is a place built on industry that has had to find a second act, and you can feel that transition in the fabric of it rather than in any polish.

The numbers back up the streetscape: terraced houses dominate the sales here, almost all of it freehold, and a typical sale sits around £150,000 — well under the Welsh average and nearly a quarter cheaper than the Carmarthenshire county figure it belongs to. A "For Sale" board here is advertising an entry point, not a stretch purchase, and the five-year price direction is described as improving even though any single year's movement barely nudges it. On the school side, Llanelli has schools across every phase — Coedcae for secondary, and a run of community primaries such as Stebonheath, Bigyn and Old Road — and the area earns its strongest single grade on schooling, well clear of the rest of the profile. Rail-wise, Llanelli Rail Station and Bynea Rail Station both sit within the town, so a car-free commute toward Swansea or Carmarthen is a realistic pattern, not a stretch.

Green space is genuinely abundant for a town this size — over a hundred separate plots of park and open ground add up to more hectares per head than the Welsh average — and that shapes the rhythm of downtime more than any restaurant strip does; this reads as a town where a walk by the water or across a local park is the default outing rather than a bought experience. Broadband is solid too, with full-fibre reaching most premises, which matters if working from home is part of the plan. The one grade that breaks the pattern is safety — while affordability, connectivity, environment, health and transport all sit comfortably above the Welsh average, safety alone slips to a middling mark, and the crime figures explain why: violence and sexual offences account for well over a third of recorded crime, and the overall rate runs more than double the Carmarthenshire county average. That is the number worth sitting with before anything else here, because everything else about Llanelli reads as unremarkable in the best sense — solid, cheap to buy into, reasonably connected — and this is the one place it does not.