Pulborough

Pulborough reads as one long high street of brick and tile-hung cottages, with the kind of shopfronts that serve locals rather than day-trippers, and a station car park that fills up with commuters' cars each morning. It's a village in the proper sense — under fifteen hundred people — but one with enough infrastructure around it that it doesn't feel stranded.

The station is the thing that makes this place work for a working-age household: Pulborough Rail Station gives you a direct line into the commuter belt, and with a median age pushing 48, you're as likely to be sat next to someone retired and settled as someone catching the 7.40. St Mary's Church of England Primary School, rated Good, is the obvious anchor for families, though it's worth knowing the village only has the one school on the ground, so secondary-age children will be travelling out. Housing here is dominated by detached freehold houses, and it shows in the numbers: a local median of £352,500 is actually below the £425,000 typical of the wider Horsham district, which makes Pulborough one of the more affordable villages within its own patch even though detached houses here still sell for well over the national detached average. That combination — freehold, detached, cheaper than the district around it — is what a For Sale board on this street is really telling you.

Green space is modest rather than abundant, with ten separate pockets adding up to a small total, so this isn't a village built around one big park; it's the kind of place where you walk the footpaths out past the houses rather than to a named green. Day-to-day life leans on the high street itself for cafés and pubs rather than a restaurant scene, and healthcare access scores strongly here — an A+ on health is unusual and worth noting if that matters to your household. The safety picture is the one figure worth sitting with: violent and sexual offences make up a third of all recorded crime, and anti-social behaviour another quarter, which sounds stark until you remember the raw count is under a hundred incidents a year across the whole village — small numbers can swing the percentages hard. The overall safety grade still comes out as A, and the trend is flat rather than worsening, so this looks more like a low base with a lumpy mix than a place with a real problem.