Prestwick

Prestwick's streets have a settled, almost retired feel to them — bay-windowed sandstone terraces, a golf course reputation that precedes the town itself, and a population whose median age sits well over a decade above the Scottish average. This isn't a town in a hurry. It's the kind of place where the person walking their dog at eleven on a Tuesday morning is as likely to be forty as seventy, because so much of the working day here happens elsewhere or not at all.

That older-skewing population tells you something about the housing too: a median price a little over £171,000 is modest against the Scottish average council tax band, and the housing grade — a C+ sitting noticeably below the A for environment and B+ for everything else — is the one out-of-step note in an otherwise comfortable set of scores. Read together, that suggests a place where the surroundings and the day-to-day feel are well looked after, but the stock itself is older, smaller, or slower to turn over than buyers might want. This is a town for people who've already done the moving around, or who are done sinking money into extension and renovation.

Green space is genuinely part of the offer — 46 pockets of it across the town, add up to over 119 hectares, which for a place of this size is a lot of room to walk off a Sunday roast without leaving the boundary. The environment grade, the highest mark on the whole card, backs that up. Connectivity holds its own too: full fibre reaches roughly two-thirds of properties, which is respectable rather than remarkable, and a B+ for nightlife suggests there's more going on in the evenings than the retired-golfer image implies — enough restaurants and bars to make a Friday out feel like an occasion rather than a compromise.