Oakham
Town · 11,870 residents
88Excellent
Excellent · better than 9 in 10 towns
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Environment scores 86, well above the typical 60
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 58 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- 100% of schools are rated Good or better by Ofsted
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 Oakham
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Oakham a good place to live?
Oakham scores 88/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as excellent — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for environment (86) and safety (83).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Oakham in East Midlands, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Oakham
Oakham's high street still runs on independent shops and stone-fronted buildings rather than chain retail, and the market square feels built for browsing, not rushing through. It's the kind of place that attracts people who've made a deliberate choice to slow down — the median age here sits close to 44, several years above the national figure, and you notice it in the unhurried pace of the place rather than in any one visible landmark.
The practical picture holds together well. Oakham has its own rail station, useful if your commute runs toward Leicester or Peterborough, and Catmose College — rated Outstanding — anchors secondary education alongside a run of academy-converter primaries and a couple of well-known independent schools, Oakham School among them. A 275,000 median house price sits close to the national average and comfortably below Rutland's own 320,500 benchmark, so you're not paying a premium to live inside the county's best-known town. Detached houses dominate what sells here, nearly all of it freehold, which tells you this is a place people buy into rather than pass through — the kind of street where a For Sale board usually means a family selling up after a couple of decades, not a landlord cashing out.
Green space is genuinely woven into daily life — 45 separate spaces adding up to over 26 hectares for a town of just 7,500 people is a generous ratio, and it shows in how people structure a free afternoon: a walk, then lunch somewhere independent rather than a chain. Health and environment both score at the top of the local grading, and that combination of open space and good general health provision tends to matter more to residents day-to-day than any single facility. The one place the picture wobbles is crime: the overall numbers are unremarkable for a town this size, but the rate sits noticeably above Rutland's county-wide average, and violence and sexual offences make up the largest single share of incidents. It's worth naming plainly rather than glossing over, even against an otherwise strong set of grades.