Old Hurst
Village · 285 residents
52Fair
Fair · better than 1 in 10 villages
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 53 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- Affordability scores 70, well above the typical 60
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 13% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Transport scores 31, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Map outline: Civil parish boundary
Is Old Hurst a good place to live?
Old Hurst scores 52/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (75) and affordability (70).
It scores lowest on transport (31).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Old Hurst in East of England, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Old Hurst
Old Hurst is the kind of place you drive through slowly without quite meaning to — a scatter of detached houses on generous plots, hedgerows rather than pavements, and little sense that anyone is passing through who doesn't already live here. With a population of 151, this isn't a village with a high street so much as a postcode with a shared identity, and it attracts people who have already decided they don't need one.
The numbers back up the impression of settled comfort rather than churn. A median age of 51.2, against a national figure of 40.4, tells you this is a place people move to rather than pass through on the way somewhere else, and the income decile of 9 confirms it as one of the better-off corners of Huntingdonshire — houses here sell 16% above the district median, and the property record is almost entirely detached freeholds, with a sample skewed heavily toward £500k-plus family homes rather than anything smaller or rented. That's a For Sale board that says "settle down," not "starter home." What's harder to square is the transport grade sitting at a C while almost everything else — affordability, connectivity, health, safety — clusters around B and A; this reads as a place built around the car, where broadband (77% full fibre coverage) does more of the connecting than any station or bus route.
Green space is genuinely thin on the ground here — one plot recorded, well under a hectare — so this isn't a village organised around a park or common; the appeal is the private garden and the open countryside beyond the boundary rather than a shared green. Crime is low in absolute terms, just 9 incidents logged in the past year, and the safety grade sits at A, comfortably ahead of what you'd expect regionally, though it's worth naming the one crime category that dominates what little there is: violence and sexual offences account for well over a third of recorded incidents, a pattern common in small rural areas where a handful of cases skew the percentages sharply. The trend is flat, not worsening, which is the more useful signal than the raw share.