Swaffham Prior
Village · 580 residents
53Fair
Fair · better than 1 in 10 villages
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: 45 per 1,000 people a year against 100
Check before you view
- Flood risk: 30% of the area is in the highest flood zone, so check the street
- Transport scores 31, below the typical 60
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Swaffham Prior
Map outline: Official built-up area
Is Swaffham Prior a good place to live?
Swaffham Prior scores 53/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for safety (82).
It scores lowest on transport (31).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Swaffham Prior in East of England, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Swaffham Prior
Swaffham Prior is the kind of village where the streetscape does the talking: timber and brick cottages, a scatter of larger detached houses, and not much passing traffic beyond people who actually mean to be there. It's small — properly small, not village-marketing-speak small — and it attracts people who've settled rather than people passing through, which the median age of 48 rather gives away.
The practical picture here is mixed in an interesting way. There's no rail station in the village itself, and the transport grade sits at a C+, the one obviously weaker mark in an otherwise solid set of grades — so this is a driving village, not a commuter-belt one, whatever the London-adjacent postcode might suggest to an estate agent. Schooling, by contrast, is a genuine strength: Swaffham Prior Church of England Primary School is rated Good and sits right in the village, with Swaffham Bulbeck's own Good-rated primary close enough to widen the choice. Housing here is almost entirely freehold and skews terraced and detached in equal measure, with a median sale price around £351,000 — a touch above both the East Cambridgeshire district figure and the regional median, which fits a place that's more established than aspirational.
Day-to-day life is modest rather than eventful. Green space is limited in raw acreage — a handful of small plots rather than sprawling parkland — so this isn't a village built around big open-air weekends; it's more back garden and country lane than public park. Healthcare and connectivity both score respectably (full fibre reaches most of the village), so working from home here is realistic even if the commute by train is not. Crime is genuinely low in absolute terms — two incidents logged in the past year, with the safety grade at an A and holding flat — though it's worth knowing that violent and sexual offences make up the largest share of what does get recorded locally, a pattern common to small samples where a few incidents skew the percentages. Affordability sits comfortably above the national average for the area's income profile, decile 7 on both counts, which points to a settled, moderately prosperous population rather than a stretched one.