Questions, answered plainly.

Good for its city. Scores are relative — they rank each place against every other area in the same city, not against some absolute ideal. A high "quiet streets" score means quieter than most of that city, not silent; even a city's calmest neighbourhoods carry more traffic than a country village. Read every score as "compared to the rest of the city."

Every score is a rank against the rest of its city, so as we add areas the comparison gets more complete and scores shift a little to match. That's the ruler getting better, not the area changing. We hold the ruler steady between updates and re-base it in one deliberate step, so scores don't drift day to day — and we date each city's latest re-base on our Data sources page.

Not unless you want it to. The tool starts with all six set level, because what matters most is yours to decide, not ours. Move any one of them and the whole city re-ranks around your priorities. You can try it for yourself on our Behind the score page.

It measures whether you can meet an ordinary day's needs on foot — how many everyday places there are within about 800 metres, and how varied they are. A parade with a newsagent, a chemist, a café and a library scores better than the same number of identical takeaways. What it can't measure is the way a place looks or how old it is: a well-served 1930s suburb can score higher than a prettier village with nothing open. Like all six, you can turn it up or down.

No. Every score is calculated by our own code from public datasets — the same inputs always produce the same number, and you can read exactly how on our Behind the score page. We use AI to help draft each area's written profile (there are too many for us to write entirely by hand) which is then checked against the data. The words get a machine's help; the numbers don't.

Because a score would claim to measure safety, and recorded crime doesn't measure safety — it measures what the police record. So we show it beside the score rather than inside it: every area (excluding Manchester) has a recorded-crime band for its own city, you can see how it varies from street to street, and you can set a limit of your own to filter the map. It describes an area; it does not rate it. How we work it out, and where it isn't available yet, is on our Recorded crime page.

Because a good commute depends on where you're going, and we don't know that. A single "connectivity" score would have to assume a destination — usually the city centre — which quietly builds someone else's life into your results. Instead we show you the stations, the lines and how long the nearest one takes to walk to, and let you judge it against your own map. In London you can also filter by TfL fare zone — each area shows its nearest station's zone, and stations on a boundary show both. Ranking by journey time to a destination you choose is something we'd like to add.

You can filter by price — sold-price data from HM Land Registry sits behind the street view, so you can rule out what's out of reach. What you can't yet do is rank by value for money, because "good value" depends on what you're getting for it, and turning that into a single number honestly is harder than it looks. Price never affects a score: we score the place, not what it costs. If you're renting, the same filter has a Rent mode — average rents for each council area, by bedroom count (see "I'm renting, not buying — is this for me?").

Absolutely — simply switch the budget filter from Buy to Rent and see rent instead of sale prices: we use average monthly rents from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, shown by bedroom count. The ONS updates them monthly, and our Data sources page shows which month you're seeing. But, just so you know: the official rent statistics exist only for whole council areas, not for an individual neighbourhood or street, so when you're looking at the numbers, remember that every area in the same council area shows the same figure — the filter tells council areas apart, but not the neighbourhoods within them, and streets have no rent figures at all (we switch the filter off at that point). Rent, like price, never affects a score: we score the place, not what it costs to live there.

Local knowledge is genuinely valuable, and our scores are designed to complement it, not overrule it. A score captures what data can measure consistently across the whole city; it can't feel a street the way you do on a Saturday morning. If your instinct and our score disagree, treat it as a prompt to go and look — both are telling you something.

Our six criteria measure what's there — shops, schools, parks, how busy the roads are. They don't measure how well any of it is kept. An area can have everything within walking distance and still feel run-down, and no dataset we know of captures that reliably across a whole city. It's one of the clearest reasons to treat a good score as a reason to go and look, rather than a reason not to.

Neighbourhoods are scored; streets aren't. A neighbourhood score sums up the wider area on the six things you've weighted. The street view then looks closer in and shows facts rather than a score — the kind of road, when the homes were built, how big they are, what they've sold for and how often they come up — so you can filter down to the streets that fit. Where something genuinely can't be measured street by street, we tell you, and we'd always suggest visiting at different times of day.

Yes. In the street view, open any postcode and choose ‘Streets like this one’. You'll get the other streets in that area with the same kind of road, the same kind of home and the same build era, each with a note of how it compares on size, price and through traffic. It looks within the area you're in, not across the whole city, and it won't offer a list where we don't hold enough about a street to compare it fairly — it tells you what's missing instead.

Within our areas, yes — the street view covers every postcode in each of them. Beyond them, no: our areas don't reach every corner of each city, so some streets sit outside them. If the road you're looking at is one of those, treat the nearest area as your guide, then go and walk it. That's advice we'd give even where a street is covered.

From public data — government and public datasets, plus OpenStreetMap, the open map of the world maintained by its contributors. What we never use is opinion: no user reviews, no star ratings, no forum sentiment. You can see the full list, with every licence, on our Data sources page.

It varies by source — some publishers update monthly, some once a year, and the census only every ten years. We aim to take the most recent release of each, but what counts as "most recent" differs from one source to the next, so we don't generalise here: our Data sources page shows the period every figure covers, and when each city's scores were last re-based.

Not to start with. The full neighbourhood map is open to everyone, with every score and every filter, and you can search any postcode in the cities we cover. The really useful bit comes when you start looking at the streets themselves: a free account unlocks that street-level view, and lets you save areas so they're there when you come back.

No. We don't sell your data or share it with others so they can advertise to you.

Yes — most of it. Search, Matches, My areas and every panel work by keyboard and with screen readers; picking an area directly on the map still needs a mouse or a finger. Our accessibility page has the full, honest picture.

No — it's information to help you make your own decision. We give you a clear, consistent read on what different areas offer so you can weigh them up, but the choice, and any professional advice you take, is yours.