Port Isaac

Port Isaac's cottages tumble down towards the harbour in the way that puts it on calendars and postcards, and the visible traffic on the narrow lanes tells you most of what you need to know before you even check a single figure: this is a place built for visitors as much as residents, with terraced stone houses stacked close and a working slipway rather than a retail high street. The median age of 53 confirms it — this isn't a village of young families cycling to school, it's one of longer-settled residents and second-homers, with a population so small that any given year's crime count barely moves the needle nationally.

That last point matters, because the headline crime comparison against Cornwall looks alarming on paper and shouldn't be read that way: with a population of only 21 in this dataset, a single year's tally of violent and sexual offence cases dominates the percentage share in a way that would happen in any hamlet this size. The safety grade sits respectably in the B+ band and the trend is marked as worsening, which is worth noting rather than dismissing, but the scale here is too small for the percentage swing to mean what it would in a town of thousands. Schools are the softer spot in the picture — Port Isaac Academy carries an Inadequate Ofsted rating, and the neighbouring St Kew Academy has no current rating logged, which for anyone moving here with children is a real conversation to have before signing anything, not an afterthought.

Housing here is unmistakably a coastal-village market: freehold sits at 100% of recorded sales, terraced houses are the dominant type, and with a median price of £325,000 against a Cornwall-wide median of £285,000, you're paying a premium of around 14% over the county for the privilege of the postcode. No new-builds feature in the sales sample, which fits a place where the housing stock is what it is — older stone cottages rather than modern estates — and where the spread runs wide, from around £275,000 up past £445,000, depending on whether you're buying a cottage or something larger up the hill. Rent, at just over £1,000 a month, sits a touch below both the regional and national medians, which is unusual for a spot this photogenic and suggests the rental market here is thin rather than cheap.