Paddock Wood
Town · 7,516 residents
68Good
Good · better than 6 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
- 67% of residents live within five minutes of a park
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 22% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Paddock Wood
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Paddock Wood a good place to live?
Paddock Wood scores 68/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for environment (81).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Paddock Wood in South East, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Paddock Wood
Paddock Wood reads as a working village rather than a picture-postcode one: a station, a run of semi-detached houses on quiet estate roads, and a high street built for errands rather than browsing. It's the kind of place that attracts people who want a garden and a train ticket into Kent's bigger towns, not people chasing a scene.
The practical shape of life here is straightforward. Paddock Wood Rail Station anchors the village, and with a median age of 45 this isn't primarily a young-professional commuter dorm — it skews toward settled households and older residents who've been here a while. Leigh Academy Paddock Wood, the primary, carries a Good Ofsted rating, though the secondary, Leigh Academy Mascalls, posts a below-average Progress 8 score of -0.17, which is worth sitting with if you've got teenagers heading toward GCSEs. Housing is dominated by semi-detached freeholds — the sales data shows 24 of 58 recent transactions were semis, with freehold ownership running at over 90% — so a For Sale board here typically means a three-bed semi with its own drive, not a flat share or a leasehold flat conversion.
Money-wise, Paddock Wood sits close to the national grain: a median house price of £375,000 is above the England-wide median but a shade below both the regional average and its own parent district, Tunbridge Wells, where prices run about 1.4% higher. Income and deprivation deciles put it in the middle of the national spread — comfortable, not affluent — which tracks with an affordability grade that lags the rest of the area's mostly strong ratings. Rent, at £1,521 median, runs well above the national figure, so this reads more as an owner-occupier's village than a rental market. The five-year price trend is essentially flat, and crime follows the same pattern — stable rather than rising or falling — with violence and sexual offences, shoplifting and anti-social behaviour making up the bulk of the 519 incidents logged, a mix that's fairly typical of a small town centre with a working high street rather than anything alarming.