Preston
City · 147,825 people live here · 29 areas
Check Local Score for Preston as a whole: 61, good, better than 5 in 10 cities. 60 is typical for the country.
Summary · written from the figures for Preston
Preston reads as a working city rather than a showcase one: rows of Victorian terraces run into semis on the fringes, the housing stock still dominated by freehold two-and-three-beds that have never pretended to be anything grander. This is a place built around ordinary life rather than performance of it, and it attracts people who want a functioning city on a modest budget rather than a postcard.
That affordability is the headline, and it shows up everywhere once you look. A median house price of £180,000 sits well below both the regional figure and the national one, and even against its own district benchmark Preston isn't paying a premium — it simply is the benchmark here. Terraces trade around £126,000, semis around £200,000, both comfortably under what the same property types fetch across England as a whole. Wages tell a matching story: Preston sits low on the income scale nationally, middling on general deprivation, which is the quieter and more honest way of saying the cost of living is low because pay is too. For someone commuting out from Preston Rail Station, that trade-off can work in your favour; for someone earning locally, less so. Schools add a genuine bright spot to the practical picture — Broughton High School and Barton St Lawrence Church of England Primary both carry Outstanding ratings, and Broughton's progress 8 score of 0.55 is well above what you'd expect from the area's average, a school doing more for its pupils than the surrounding statistics might suggest.
Pick what matters to you and the areas reorder. Choose an area to see why it ranks where it does, then open its report. Or see the report for Preston as a whole, with every figure and the map.
What matters to you · pick up to three
Areas ranked overall
Areas are laid out roughly as they sit in Preston, north at the top. Scores are out of 100; 60 is typical for the country.
Frenchwood
70Ranked 1 of 29 by overall. Strongest on food & drink (86), weakest on property market (50).
Is Preston a good place to live?
Preston scores 61/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for affordability (71) and environment (70).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Preston in North West, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Preston
Preston reads as a working city rather than a showcase one: rows of Victorian terraces run into semis on the fringes, the housing stock still dominated by freehold two-and-three-beds that have never pretended to be anything grander. This is a place built around ordinary life rather than performance of it, and it attracts people who want a functioning city on a modest budget rather than a postcard.
That affordability is the headline, and it shows up everywhere once you look. A median house price of £180,000 sits well below both the regional figure and the national one, and even against its own district benchmark Preston isn't paying a premium — it simply is the benchmark here. Terraces trade around £126,000, semis around £200,000, both comfortably under what the same property types fetch across England as a whole. Wages tell a matching story: Preston sits low on the income scale nationally, middling on general deprivation, which is the quieter and more honest way of saying the cost of living is low because pay is too. For someone commuting out from Preston Rail Station, that trade-off can work in your favour; for someone earning locally, less so. Schools add a genuine bright spot to the practical picture — Broughton High School and Barton St Lawrence Church of England Primary both carry Outstanding ratings, and Broughton's progress 8 score of 0.55 is well above what you'd expect from the area's average, a school doing more for its pupils than the surrounding statistics might suggest.
Green space is generous rather than showy — 278 sites and over 700 hectares of it spread through the city, enough that most streets have somewhere to walk the dog without needing a car. The population itself skews slightly younger than the national median age, and a density around 1,000 people per square kilometre feels distinctly urban without being crowded — closer to a proper city than a market town. Where the picture turns is safety: Preston's overall grade sits comfortably around the national average, but safety alone drops a notch below the rest, with violence and anti-social behaviour together accounting for close to six in ten recorded incidents. That's the one grade that breaks pattern with an otherwise unremarkable, steady set of scores — and it's worth sitting with rather than skating past, even as the trend line on safety is moving in the right direction, not the wrong one.