Lye
Suburb · 11 residents
62Good
Good · better than 6 in 10 suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- 3 GP practices within a short walk
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Lye
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Lye a good place to live?
Lye scores 62/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for health (86).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Lye in West Midlands, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Lye
Terraced rows and squat semis line the streets here, the kind of housing stock that's been sold and resold as starter homes for decades rather than done up for a market that never quite arrived. It's a working suburb of Dudley, not a destination one — the sort of place where the population skews young, the median age sitting around 30, and you sense people are here because it's affordable and close to things, not because they fell in love with a high street.
That affordability is the real story. The median sale price sits close to £172,000, against a national figure well over £280,000 and even below the regional Dudley benchmark — this is a market roughly a quarter cheaper than the borough average it sits in, which itself is already one of the more modest corners of the West Midlands. Every sale in the local sample was freehold, mostly semis and terraces, which tells you what a for-sale board here means: small, owned outright in tenure terms, no new-build gloss, no leasehold estate management fees to worry about. On the income and deprivation measures, Lye sits at the very bottom of the national scale, decile one on both counts — a plain signal that wages and opportunity locally lag a long way behind the country as a whole, even if the immediate feel of the streets doesn't announce it.
Day-to-day, the picture is steadier than the headline deprivation numbers suggest. Full fibre reaches the large majority of homes, health outcomes and the general environment both score comfortably above the national average, and safety — despite violence and sexual offences accounting for close to half of recorded crime locally — reads as flat rather than worsening, with the overall safety grade actually coming out above average. Transport is the one soft spot in an otherwise solid set of marks: the transport grade lags behind everything else, suggesting this is a place better suited to a car or a short bus hop than a rail commute, and schools land at a respectable but unspectacular mid-table grade rather than anything exceptional.