Plympton St. Maurice in South West has a Check Local Score of 62/100 (good), drawn from official data on safety, schools, transport, housing, amenities and the local environment, each measured against the national average — a score of 60 is typical for the country.
Plympton St. Maurice reads like an old village that Plymouth grew around rather than swallowed: a cluster of terraced and semi-detached streets, a castle and guildhall at its centre, and a population that skews noticeably older than the national norm. This isn't a place of new-build cul-de-sacs — there isn't one to be found — and that absence of churn says something about who stays put here once they arrive.
The practical picture is steady rather than sharp. There's no rail station listed for the immediate area, so this is a driving or bus suburb more than a commuter-belt one, with six local transport stops doing the connecting work. Schools follow a similar pattern of solid-not-spectacular: Old Priory Junior Academy and Plympton St Mary's CofE Infant School both carry Good Ofsted ratings, and with a median age of 46 — six years above the national figure — you're looking at an area that has already raised its children or is settling in for the long haul rather than one full of nurseries and toddler groups. Housing here is overwhelmingly freehold terraces and semis, and at a median price around £230,000 against Plymouth's £222,000 benchmark, buying in costs only a little more than the wider city — this is affordable by national standards, sitting well below the England-wide median of £281,000, which is where the strong affordability grading comes from.
Green space is modest rather than generous — just under six and a half hectares across two named plots, less per head than the regional average — but the historic core, with its guildhall and steep lanes, gives the area a sense of place that a bigger park wouldn't necessarily add. It's the kind of suburb where a Saturday shape emerges around a walk through the old village rather than a destination night out: the nightlife grading here is the weakest in the set, a clear notch below everything else, and it's the one grade worth flagging as the quiet outlier in an otherwise consistent B+ picture. Safety, meanwhile, is rated well and has held flat over time, even though the raw crime rate sits above the Plymouth unitary authority average — violence and sexual offences make up the bulk of recorded incidents, as they do in most comparable suburbs, and burglary and robbery are both rare here.
This suits someone past the first-time-buyer scramble, comfortable without a rail commute, who wants a period-flavoured village feel with the city's amenities in reach rather than on the doorstep. It's a harder sell if you want a buzzing evening scene or you're pricing in a train season ticket — for those, this postcode will feel like a compromise rather than a find.
Data last updated: 15 August 2026
Pick another area to line them up side by side — the verdict, both Check Local Scores, and what actually separates them.