St Catherine's Hill
Suburb · 42 residents
48Fair
Fair · better than 1 in 10 suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 32% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
- Aircraft noise reaches 20% of the area
- Health scores 16, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around St Catherine's Hill
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is St Catherine's Hill a good place to live?
St Catherine's Hill scores 48/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
No topic reaches "very good" (70+); its best is safety (66).
It scores lowest on health (16) and food & drink (31).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for St Catherine's Hill in South West, each measured against the national average.
Summary of St Catherine's Hill
Detached houses on generous plots, hedges rather than fences, and barely another soul on the pavement — that's the first impression of St Catherine's Hill, and it doesn't really change on a second visit. This is a small pocket, barely more than a hundred people by the local count, and it feels it: quiet roads, low density, and a sense that everyone here has already made their choices in life rather than being about to make them.
The numbers back up what you can see. A median age of 57 (against a national figure closer to 40) tells you this isn't a place with young families jostling for school places — fitting, since the one school in the area, Portfield School, is a non-maintained special school rather than a mainstream primary or secondary. If you're commuting daily into a city centre or need a wide choice of schools, this isn't built for that rhythm. Housing here is overwhelmingly detached and freehold — eight of nine recent sales were detached houses bought outright rather than leasehold flats — and at a median of £500,000, against a national detached median of £420,000, a board on this street reads as a solid, unhurried, one-family-forever kind of purchase rather than a stepping-stone.
Money-wise, this sits comfortably above the national picture without being exceptional for its region: an income decile of 5 and deprivation decile of 6 put it squarely mid-table nationally, but the house prices tell a different story — 49.7% above the wider Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole average, which suggests you're paying a premium for space and quiet rather than for postcode prestige. Green space is modest but present — one plot of just over 7 hectares — and with only a handful of properties around, there's no real restaurant or high street scene to speak of; this is a place you drive out from for dinner, not one where you wander to it. The crime figures need a health warning of arithmetic rather than danger: 13 incidents a year sounds trivial, and in raw terms it is, but with so few residents the rate per head looks startling next to the borough average — treat that as a quirk of small numbers rather than a lived reality of unsafe streets, and note that violence and anti-social behaviour top the list, as they do almost everywhere.