Solihull

The high street here still has the John Lewis and the independent boutiques rather than the pound shops and vape stores that mark out struggling town centres, and the mix of Range Rovers and school-run people-carriers in the car parks tells you most of what you need to know about who shops there. Solihull reads as comfortable rather than flashy: mock-Tudor semis, wide grass verges, hedges cut with intent.

The practical picture is a good one, if not a spectacular one. Eleven rail stations serve the wider borough, including Birmingham International with its direct airport link, and Hampton-in-Arden covers the town itself, so a commuter can be in central Birmingham inside twenty minutes and at an actual departure gate not much longer after that. Schools are a genuinely mixed bag rather than a uniform strength: Tudor Grange Primary Academy Yew Tree and Coppice Academy both carry Good ratings, Lode Heath School posts a solidly positive Progress 8 score for its secondary leavers, and the fee-paying Solihull School sits in the mix too for those looking that way — but the borough-wide average Ofsted score is only middling, so it's worth checking the school for your actual street rather than assuming the town's reputation covers every catchment. Housing is dominated by semi-detached freeholds, which is exactly what you'd expect from the streetscape, with a median price sitting close to the regional and national averages rather than pulling away from them the way you'd see closer to Birmingham's smartest inner suburbs; detached houses here do carry a real premium over the national figure, so the flats-versus-houses gap in price is wider than in most towns this size.