Townsend is terraced streets and period brick, the kind of place where a For Sale board reads "freehold, three bed, needs nothing doing to it" — and the sales figures back that up, with terraced houses the dominant stock and freehold ownership running well ahead of leasehold. This is St Albans without quite being St Albans: smaller, denser, and pitched at people who've already worked out which streets they want and are waiting for one to come up. The numbers explain the waiting. A terraced house here has a median price north of £600,000, against a national terrace median closer to a quarter of that, and even against St Albans itself the area sits only marginally cheaper. That gap is the trade-off in one line: you're paying St Albans money for a suburb rather than the centre, and the affordability grade — the one clear outlier against an otherwise strong set — says so plainly. Schools don't have that problem. St Michael's Church of England Primary, rated Outstanding, sits in the mix, and with a median age of 38 this reads as a place where people settle rather than pass through, buying somewhere they can stay in rather than trade up from quickly. Green space runs a little below the regional average per head, and at nearly 2,000 people per square kilometre this is dense, packed-in living rather than anything spread out — you feel it on the pavement more than you would in a village. Crime sits at a level that keeps the overall safety grade solid, though violence and anti-social behaviour together account for well over half of the incidents logged in the past year, and the trend is flat rather than improving — worth knowing rather than worrying about, since the overall picture holds up against national and regional benchmarks. Connectivity is a genuine strength: full fibre reaches most homes, which matters if working from one of these terraces is part of the plan. This suits someone who has decided that St Albans-adjacent is close enough, who wants a freehold terrace and an Outstanding primary school more than they want a garden the size of a tennis court, and who can absorb rents averaging close to £2,000 a month without blinking. It will frustrate anyone hunting for a bargain, or anyone who wants more breathing room than a dense Victorian street plan allows. The trade-off is transparent, at least: you're buying into schooling and streetscape, and paying the going rate to do it.