Oulder Hill
Suburb · 1,432 residents
64Good
Good · better than 7 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
- 79% of residents live within five minutes of a park
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Food & drink scores 31, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Oulder Hill
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Oulder Hill a good place to live?
Oulder Hill scores 64/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for environment (77).
It scores lowest on food & drink (31).
Safety isn't scored here: street-level police data for the area is incomplete, so the overall score leaves it out.
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Oulder Hill in North West, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Oulder Hill
Detached houses with gardens, a decent stretch of green between them, and a fair number of cars on the drive rather than the street — that's the visual signature of Oulder Hill before you've read a single statistic. It's a suburb of Rochdale rather than a destination in its own right, and it looks like one: quiet, residential, unshowy.
The numbers back up that first impression more than they complicate it. The overall grade here sits well above the national average, and the environment score in particular is exceptional — with 28 hectares of green space shared across a population of under 1,300, this is a low-density, outdoorsy sort of suburb rather than a paved-over one. What's odd, and worth sitting with, is that the income decile is the lowest on the scale even though the wider deprivation picture (imd_decile 3) and most of the grades read as comfortably above average. That's the quiet spine of this place: it feels and scores better than a typical low-income area normally would, which suggests older, asset-rich, cash-poor households rather than hardship in the conventional sense — plausible given a median age approaching 40 and a housing stock that's mostly owned outright or with a mortgage rather than rented.
On schooling, the picture is thin but specific. Oulder Hill Leadership Academy, the secondary here, posts a Progress 8 score of -0.11 — behind where it should be — and there's no Ofsted rating attached to it or to Redwood, the special school also serving the area. That's the one grade out of step with everything else: a B+ for schools sits somewhat generously against a secondary that isn't adding the value you'd hope for, so if education is high on your list, look at the detail rather than the letter. Housing, by contrast, tells a straightforwardly reassuring story. A typical sale here is a freehold detached house, and at a median of £136,250 the area is priced well under both the regional and national norms — remarkable given it sits 76% above the wider Rochdale borough median, telling you Oulder Hill is the pricier, more spacious end of that borough even while it remains affordable by national standards. Prices have been drifting up gently rather than sharply, a trend better read as a slow, steady climb than a spike.