Penzance

Terraced granite cottages run down towards the harbour, punctuated by independent cafés and the odd surf shop, and the crowd on the street skews older and settled rather than transient — the median age here sits close to 49, nearly a decade above the national figure. It's a working town with a working harbour, not a manicured resort, and that gives it an edge that some will find real and others will find rough round the edges.

The practicalities are where Penzance gets interesting. Penzance Rail Station puts you on the branch line east without needing a car, which matters given how far west you are. Schooling is mixed rather than uniformly reassuring: Humphry Davy School, the main secondary, carries a Good rating, but Pensans Community Primary is rated Requires Improvement, and the town's average Ofsted score sits only fractionally above the national norm — this isn't a place where every school is a selling point, and you'd want to look at catchments individually rather than assume. Housing, meanwhile, is unusually affordable for the far South West — the median price of £251,500 runs about 9% below the wider Cornwall figure and comfortably under the national median. Terraced freehold houses dominate the market here, which is the classic Cornish town signature: small period cottages bought outright rather than flats on long leases, though flats do sell for notably less locally than the national average would suggest, while detached and semi-detached homes actually command a premium over their national comparators.

Green space is genuinely abundant for a town this size — 60 separate spaces adding up to nearly 42 hectares, well above the national density per head — and the harbour and seafront give the outdoor weekend its natural shape without you needing to plan for it. Health provision reads strongly against national benchmarks, and the nightlife grade is the standout of the whole profile, reflecting a town with a proper independent pub and restaurant scene rather than a chain-dominated high street. The one grade that jars against this otherwise comfortable picture is safety: crime here runs more than double the rate of the wider Cornwall average, driven heavily by violence and sexual offences and anti-social behaviour, and the trend is marked as worsening rather than settling. It's the quiet catch in an otherwise appealing set of figures, and worth sitting with rather than skimming past.