Tenby

Walk down the main streets in season and you'll find pastel Georgian terraces, ice-cream queues, and a harbour that does most of the talking — this is a town built for looking at the sea, not commuting away from it. Out of season it empties into something quieter and older, with a resident population that skews well past middle age and a pace that has more to do with tides than trains.

The practical picture here is unusual for a place this small. There's a station — Tenby Rail Station — which is worth noting precisely because so few villages this size still have one; it makes the town workable for those who need to reach Carmarthen or beyond without a car, even if daily commuting isn't really what this place is for. Schooling runs through a handful of community and church schools, including Ysgol Greenhill for secondary age and smaller primaries like Tenby VC and St Teilos RC — modest in size, the kind where everyone knows the head's name. Housing leans heavily towards flats bought outright: freehold ownership edges out leasehold, and the flat market here runs well above the Welsh norm, a sign that much of the stock is bought as holiday or retirement property rather than a first family home. A median house price sitting around 13% above the Pembrokeshire average confirms it — this is not the county's cheap corner, and the affordability grade, while still respectable, reflects wages that don't always match the property prices.

Green space is genuinely generous for the population — over twenty pockets of it packed into a small area — and the walking, the beaches, and the harbourside pubs form the backbone of any weekend, season allowing. Health provision draws a strong grade, and the general feel of wellbeing here is high, which matters more as the median age climbs past fifty. This is where the one jarring number sits: against a town that otherwise reads as safe and settled — top marks for environment, health, and schools — the crime figures tell a different story, with violence and sexual offences making up nearly half of all recorded incidents and the overall rate running sharply above the Pembrokeshire average. It's worth sitting with that rather than skipping past it: a small resident population combined with heavy seasonal footfall can distort a raw crime count in a way that a bigger town wouldn't show, and the safety grade itself still lands in respectable territory rather than alarming. But it's the one place where the numbers don't match the postcard.