Michaelston-super-Ely
Neighbourhood · 1,231 residents
54Fair
Fair · better than 3 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
- Property market scores 77, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Road noise reaches 65% of the area
- Food & drink scores 30, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Michaelston-super-Ely
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Michaelston-super-Ely a good place to live?
Michaelston-super-Ely scores 54/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for property market (77).
It scores lowest on food & drink (30).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Michaelston-super-Ely in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Michaelston-super-Ely
Michaelston-super-Ely sits on the western edge of Cardiff where the city loosens into fields, and the streets show it: detached houses with drives, hedges rather than walls, the kind of quiet that comes from being just far enough from the main roads. It reads as settled rather than youthful, and the mix of stone chapel, village green and newer executive homes tells you this was a village that got absorbed rather than built from scratch.
The housing here is the plainest signal of who lives locally. Semi-detached and detached homes dominate, freehold is the overwhelming norm, and at a median of £257,500 you're paying close to what you'd pay across Cardiff as a whole, if anything slightly more. A detached house here typically sells for £380,000 against a Welsh average of £325,000, which tells you this isn't a bargain corner of the city — it's a place people pay a premium for space and quiet. Schools are limited in number, just a couple serving the immediate area, with Hywel Dda Primary and St Fagans Church in Wales among the options, both community-scale rather than sprawling. With a median age of 38.6, this reads as family territory rather than a young professional's first step onto the ladder or a retirement pocket.
Green space is genuinely part of the offer — nearly 32 hectares spread across five sites for a population under 3,000 is generous by any measure, and it shows in the weekend rhythm: dog walks, pushchairs, the unhurried pace of a place where the fields are the entertainment rather than a high street. What it doesn't have is much of a nightlife or dining scene to speak of, and the connectivity is solid without being flashy — decent broadband, a reasonable spread of bus stops, but this is a driving or short-hop suburb rather than a rail commuter's dream. The one grade that jars against an otherwise comfortable picture is health, which sits well below the others — worth a closer look if local services matter to you, since nothing else in the data explains it away.