Six elements, you blend them your way

This is all about whether you can meet an ordinary day's needs on foot — the shops, the chemist, the post office, the GP, the library.

It counts how many everyday places sit within 800 metres of the centre of the area (a kilometre for GPs), and how varied they are: a parade with a newsagent, a chemist, a café and a library beats four identical takeaways.

Because who doesn’t want to support the little-guys. We look at how many independent shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants there are near the centre of the area, and how many of them are independent rather than chains. We look at ‘chain’ by its brand, not just by its name — so a Gail’s bakery counts as a chain, even on a village-feel high street (and even though they do lovely pastries!)

Whether a high street has its own character, or the same brands you'd find anywhere else.

How much progress pupils make at the state schools around each area; KS1→KS2 progress for primaries within a kilometre, Progress 8 for secondaries within two (typically children will travel further to their secondary school). Each measure is corrected for statistical reliability, so an area isn’t swung by one small school’s noisy year, then the two are blended equally.

There are some incredible schools with incredible teachers, and the progress measures give parents a great view of how well students do, largely irrespective of their starting point, so it’s a much fairer comparison.

Being near a good school isn’t the same as being in its catchment area, and our radius is simply a radius. Wherever we can, we provide links to the Government’s ‘Get information about schools’ pages.

This is all about getting outside and amongst nature. We look at this in two ways: something close-by (maybe a local pocket park), and then something bigger, enough for the kids or the dog to have a proper romp around, or maybe a picnic when the weather’s good. Both measured by approximate walk time.

Because there aren’t many of us that don’t like a bit of green and although often a pocket park hits the spot, sometimes you just need a bit more space.

We measure two walks: to the nearest mapped public green space, and to the nearest big park of 50 hectares or more (about 70 football pitches) of connected green space — blended 70:30.

We know this is an important one for many, but scoring this accurately is difficult, as the Department for Transport doesn’t measure traffic volume everywhere. Most of its counts are for main roads; we make use of those within 800m of our neighbourhood centre.

So, use this element as an indication, rather than a precise measure. Where an area has only one or two count points, we tell you, and if there are no recent ones, we roll back to earlier counts (although never beyond 2019) to try and make up for the gaps. If that fails, we won’t guess, we’ll just tell you.

When it comes to streets, it gets trickier still: the DfT don’t often measure residential streets, so at street level we don’t score quietness at all. Instead we colour each street by the kind of road Ordnance Survey says it is — a residential road, a B road, an A road — mark the ones that don’t lead anywhere else, and leave the judgement to you.

Full transparency, and although we’d love to be able to call out a ‘rat-run’, we don’t currently have a reliable source of data to do that. So use this element as a guide, get your boots on the ground and see how quiet a place feels in person.

Access to the things you do on evenings and weekends — venues, galleries, sport. This is all the fun stuff: the cheeky weeknight trip to the cinema for the latest blockbuster (or something European and artsy if that’s more your thing), a night out to see a local band, keep fit at the leisure centre, or soaking up some knowledge at the library.

Because, day-to-day life happens as much outside of the four walls as it does inside.