Roath Park

Roath Park's streets are built around one thing: the lake and the pleasure gardens around it, and the houses know it. You'll see wide Victorian terraces and bay-fronted semis facing onto green, prams and dog-walkers on the paths, joggers doing laps before work. It reads as settled and comfortable rather than edgy — the kind of place people move to and then don't leave.

The housing here says as much about who lives here as any census figure. Terraced houses dominate the market, most of it freehold, and the flow of sales skews firmly toward houses rather than flats — 29 of the last 51 sales were terraces, against just 10 flats. A median of £441,500 sits well above the Welsh average of £208,000, and the local terraced median of £305,000 nearly doubles the Welsh terrace figure — this is a part of Cardiff where a three-bed with a bay window is not a starter home. Prices have been drifting up gently rather than sharply (the housing trend is marked improving, with a modest single-digit rise over the past year), and against Cardiff as a whole, Roath Park runs about 17% pricier — you're paying a premium for the park frontage and the period stock. A median age of 31.6 fits a resident base of young professionals and established couples more than retirees; several community primaries — Roath Park Primary, Lakeside, Fairoak — sit inside the suburb, though Wales schools carry Estyn inspections rather than Ofsted grades, so the data here doesn't let you rank them against each other.