Water Hayes
Suburb · 371 residents
88Excellent
Excellent · among the highest-scoring suburbs
Check Local Score out of 100 · 60 is typical for the country
Each arc is a topic, coloured by its score
What’s good
- 6 places to eat and drink
- 4 GP practices within a short walk
- 2 rail or tube stations within a short walk
Check before you view
- Radon: part of the area is in an affected zone, and a home test is cheap
The essentials
Everyday life
The area
Around Water Hayes
Map outline: Approximate — no official boundary exists for this neighbourhood
Is Water Hayes a good place to live?
Water Hayes scores 88/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as excellent — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for food & drink (92) and health (83).
Safety isn't scored here: street-level police data for the area is incomplete, so the overall score leaves it out.
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Water Hayes in North West, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Water Hayes
Water Hayes is terraced streets, packed tightly together, the kind of density you'd normally associate with inner-city living rather than the North West — and indeed, at over 6,000 people per square kilometre, it sits well above the national average for how closely people live to one another here. Rows of leasehold terraces dominate, with the odd flat and semi breaking up the pattern. It's not a place built for show; it's a place built for getting on with things.
That terraced, leasehold character shows up directly in the numbers: seventeen of the last twenty-five sales here were terraced houses, most leasehold, and the median sale price of £110,000 sits a long way under both the regional and national terraced averages. Against Wigan, the surrounding metropolitan district, homes here changed hands at nearly 39% below the borough median — this is one of the more affordable corners of an already affordable area, and the income and deprivation deciles confirm it, sitting at the bottom of the national scale. For families weighing schools against price, there's a genuine draw: St Mary and St John Catholic Primary holds an Outstanding rating, and Mab's Cross Primary is rated Good, so the one local school on the doorstep is a strong one, even if choice beyond it is limited.
Green space is thin — there's a single recorded plot, a third of a hectare, nothing like the cushion you'd get elsewhere in the region — so this isn't an area built around parks and long dog walks. What it does offer is connectivity: full fibre reaches the vast majority of homes, a genuinely strong position, and the area's own grading reflects that with a solid connectivity score. Transport is modest rather than abundant — a handful of stops rather than a station of its own — so this reads as a walking-and-bus neighbourhood more than a rail-commuter one. The nightlife grade is the outlier here, rated well above the rest of the picture, hinting at a livelier social scene tucked into these streets than the quiet terraces might suggest at first glance.