Sherburn Hill

Terraced rows and squat semis line the streets here, the kind of housing stock that's older than it looks and priced like it too — this is a former colliery village, and it hasn't been dressed up to pretend otherwise. There's no new-build gloss, no flats, just brick that's been lived in for generations. It attracts people who already know the North East and aren't looking for a project or a postcode to boast about.

The numbers back up what you'd guess from looking at it: this sits low on the national income and deprivation scale, decile 2 on both counts, yet the affordability grade comes out at the top of the scale simply because so little else round here costs what it costs elsewhere. A semi-detached typically sells for around £102,500 against a national median north of £270,000 for the same type — a gap that wide tells you this is a market almost entirely local, bought by people working in or near County Durham rather than commuters chasing a cheaper alternative to somewhere pricier. Every sale in the sample was freehold, which suits the terraced-and-semi mix: no service charges, no leasehold small print, just a house you own outright. Ludworth Primary School is the named school on the ground, a small community primary with under a hundred pupils, the kind of size where the head knows every child's name.

Green space is thin on the ground in acreage but present in number — four separate patches add up to under three hectares, more pocket parks than parkland, enough for a dog walk rather than a Sunday hike. You won't find a restaurant scene to speak of; this is a village that eats at home or drives out for it. Crime sits low in absolute terms, a dozen incidents logged in the past year, though violence and sexual offences make up the largest share of that, as they do in most small places where a handful of incidents swings the percentages hard. Measured against County Durham as a whole the rate looks dramatically higher, but that comparison is misleading at this population size — a difference of two or three incidents year to year moves the percentage enormously, and the trend itself reads flat rather than worsening.