Townhill

Terraced rows climb the hill in tight, uniform lines here, the kind of streets built for dock and works families a century ago and still doing the same job today — solid, unpretentious, close together. It's a dense little suburb for its size, and you feel that density on the ground: narrow pavements, cars parked nose to tail, the sense that everyone's front door is close to someone else's.

The property market tells its own plain story: this is terraced-house territory, sold freehold almost without exception, with semis a distant second and nothing new being built. A typical sale sits around £137,000 — well under the Welsh median and roughly 29% cheaper than Swansea as a whole — which is why the affordability grade holds up even though this is one of the most deprived corners of Wales on both income and general deprivation measures. A For Sale board here is advertising a starter home or a long-term family terrace, not a renovation project or a new-build show home. Townhill Primary is the named school on the ground, a sizeable community school for a suburb this size, though Wales's Estyn system means you won't find an Ofsted-style grade attached to it. There's no rail station listed for the area itself, so this reads as a bus-and-car suburb rather than a commuter one, with fourteen local transport stops doing the work of getting people into Swansea proper.

Green space is modest rather than generous — around six pockets of it, a little under eight hectares in total, which is thin against the Welsh average per head, so this isn't a suburb built around big parks. What it does have is decent digital infrastructure, with full-fibre broadband reaching most homes, and a connectivity grade that outperforms almost everything else in the profile. The one grade that jars against an otherwise unremarkable B-and-C spread is health, marked down clearly, and it's worth sitting with that rather than skipping past it — it's the quiet outlier in a place that otherwise reads as ordinary rather than troubled. Safety is graded reasonably, but the underlying numbers are heavier than that grade suggests: violence and sexual offences make up close to half of all recorded crime, and the overall crime rate runs sharply above Swansea's own average, not just the odd percentage point but several times over. Public order incidents and anti-social behaviour follow behind as the next most common issues, which together sketch a suburb where trouble is more about street-level disorder than acquisitive crime — burglary and vehicle crime are both minor entries on the list.