Raynes Park
Neighbourhood · 11,819 residents
73Very good
Very good · better than 9 in 10 suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- Less recorded crime than is typical: 65 per 1,000 people a year against 100
- 100% of schools are rated Good or better by Ofsted
- 65% of residents live within five minutes of a park
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- Prices are high for local incomes: affordability scores 26, where 60 is typical
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Raynes Park
Map outline: Approximate — electoral ward boundary, used as the nearest surveyed shape
Is Raynes Park a good place to live?
Raynes Park scores 73/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as very good — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (77) and schools (77).
It scores lowest on affordability (26).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Raynes Park in London, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Raynes Park
Raynes Park announces itself with terraced streets running off a modest high street, the kind of place where the shopfronts do the job rather than showing off, and where the crowd waiting at the station in the morning looks like it's heading into town for work rather than out for the evening. It has the settled, slightly unglamorous feel of a place people move to rather than discover.
The station is the organising fact of daily life here — Raynes Park's own stop anchors the area, and with fourteen local transport stops feeding into it, this reads as a commuter's suburb before anything else. The schools back that up: an Ofsted-rated Good in West Wimbledon Primary sits alongside Raynes Park High School, whose GCSE progress score is modestly positive rather than exceptional. Housing matches the story — terraced freeholds dominate the sales here, the kind of three-bed-and-a-garden stock that a family buys once and stays in. At a median of £527,500 that's noticeably pricier than the Merton average, and well above the national picture, though it still undercuts much of inner London. The one-year price movement has dipped slightly, but the longer trend is essentially flat, which suits people buying to live rather than to flip.
Green space is tight rather than generous — the local parks amount to a handful of hectares, not sprawling grounds, so this isn't an area built around long dog walks or picnicking crowds. What it lacks in park acreage it partly makes up in a settled, family-weighted rhythm: a median age in the high thirties, decent full-fibre broadband coverage, and a high street that leans practical over destination dining. The safety picture is the area's quiet complication — the overall grade sits comfortably in Good territory, and connectivity and housing grades match that, but health services score more modestly, and the crime rate itself runs notably higher than the Merton average, with violence and anti-social behaviour the two categories doing most of the lifting. It's not an area that feels unsafe to walk through, but the numbers don't quite match the generally comfortable tone everything else sets.