Pencaerau
Suburb · 41 residents
49Fair
Fair · better than 1 in 10 suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
- Health scores 17, below the typical 60
- Food & drink scores 33, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Pencaerau
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Pencaerau a good place to live?
Pencaerau scores 49/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
No topic reaches "very good" (70+); its best is safety (68).
It scores lowest on health (17) and food & drink (33).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Pencaerau in Wales, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Pencaerau
Terraced rows dominate here, the kind of tight-knit streets where cars line both kerbs and the pavements are narrow enough that you nod at whoever's coming the other way. Pencaerau reads as solidly residential and unshowy — a small pocket of Neath Port Talbot where the housing stock is old enough to have settled into itself, and nobody's pretending otherwise.
The property picture is about as plain-spoken as it gets: terraced houses, freehold nearly across the board, and a median sale price around £145,000 — cheaper than the Neath Port Talbot average and well under the Welsh median. A For Sale board on one of these streets is advertising affordability first, character second. That affordability shows up again in the council tax band D figure, which sits above both the Neath Port Talbot and Welsh averages — an odd wrinkle for a place this inexpensive to buy into, worth checking before you commit. Ysgol Carreg Hir, the community primary here, has several hundred pupils on its roll, so it's not a school running on fumes; there's no secondary or rail station named for this immediate patch, so anyone commuting by train is looking beyond the suburb itself.
Green space and eating-out options aren't part of this particular picture, so it's hard to sketch the weekend rhythm with any honesty — this is a place you'd furnish your own Saturday around, using what's nearby rather than what's on the doorstep. What the numbers do say clearly is that this is a settled, middle-aged community — median age around 39 to 40 — living fairly densely for a suburb, and on paper it sits in the less affluent third of Wales by income, even though the overall character grade comes out respectable, solidly at the Welsh average across safety, schools, transport and connectivity alike.