Where to live in Bristol and the West of England

BristolCentral

The Floating Harbour is the one part of Bristol that reads as a waterfront city rather than a hill town, and two decades of conversion have turned its warehouses and dock sheds into the densest flat stock in the region. You pay for the water and the ten-minute walk to everything.

BristolCentral

Bristol's oldest surviving high street, cut in half by the 1960s ring road and slowly recovering ever since. It holds the city's queer nightlife, a stretch of genuinely fine Georgian frontages, and rents noticeably below the harbour for a shorter walk to Temple Meads.

BristolCentral

The half-mile of Stokes Croft did more to shape Bristol's self-image than any other street — murals, co-ops, late licences and a running argument about what the area is for. Kingsdown behind it is the opposite: steep Georgian terraces, silent by ten, with the best views in the city.

BristolInner

The half of BS3 that has not been rewritten yet. East Street is still a working high street of pound shops and butchers rather than a destination, and the terraces behind it are the last inner-Bristol stock at a genuine discount — with a station, which Southville does not have.

BristolInner

Gloucester Road is the longest run of independent shops in the country and Bishopston is the neighbourhood wrapped around it — Edwardian terraces, good schools, and a weekly argument about whether a chain has ruined the street. It is Bristol's most reliable family choice inside the inner ring.

BristolInner

Georgian crescents, the Suspension Bridge and four hundred acres of Downs on the doorstep. Clifton is the address most people picture when they picture Bristol, and it prices accordingly — though the student presence around the Triangle keeps it livelier and less museum-like than its architecture suggests.

BristolInner

The slice between Clifton and the university, and effectively its overflow: large Victorian houses cut into flats, Cotham Hill's short run of restaurants, and a fifteen-minute walk to almost anything you would want. It is Clifton's amenities at a discount you pay for in slightly less grand streets.

BristolInner

The most genuinely mixed part of Bristol and the best-value place to live inside the inner ring. St Mark's Road alone will feed you better than most city centres, and two stations put Temple Meads four minutes away — a combination nowhere else in the city matches at this price.

BristolInner

Painted terraces on impossible gradients, a station hidden in a cutting, and Picton Street doing more with fifty metres than most high streets manage with five hundred. Montpelier is the closest thing Bristol has to a village that happens to sit fifteen minutes from the centre.

BristolInner

Wide Victorian villa streets, a station on the Severn Beach line and Chandos Road's cluster of restaurants and delis. Redland is where Bristol's graduates move when they stop wanting to live above a bar, and it has the settled, slightly smug feel that implies.

BristolInner

The Tobacco Factory turned a derelict bonded warehouse into a theatre, a market and the anchor of North Street, and Southville rearranged itself around it. Twenty minutes' walk from the harbour across the swing bridge, with the strongest independent high street south of the river.

BristolInner

The painted terraces stacked up the hill above Temple Meads are the first thing most people see arriving in Bristol by train, and living in them means a fifteen-minute walk to the station that is entirely downhill one way. Quiet, tight-knit and steep in a way that decides things for people.

South GloucestershireOuter

Built from nothing in the 1980s and 90s, and still the largest new settlement in Europe by that measure. Modern housing, good schools, very low crime and a total absence of anything older than the residents — which is precisely what people move here for.

BristolOuter

The A4 corridor out towards Bath, with the MetroBus running down it and Nightingale Valley and the Avon on its southern edge. Practical rather than charming, and one of the few parts of Bristol where a car is genuinely useful rather than a liability.

South GloucestershireOuter

Bristol's aerospace town, built around the airfield that made Concorde and now around Airbus, Rolls-Royce and GKN. Two stations and a straight run to Parkway make it the best-connected place in the region for anyone whose job is in the north fringe.

BristolOuter

A former mill village absorbed into the city, with its own high street, a big student population from the UWE campus up the road, and the Bristol and Bath Railway Path running straight through it. The cycling is the reason to be here.

BristolOuter

The southern edge of the city, built around the old Whitchurch airfield and now around a leisure park, a hospital and a very large amount of new housing. The cheapest way into Bristol proper, with the MetroBus doing more heavy lifting than any other single route in the city.

BristolOuter

Interwar semis, a well-kept high street and the Downs at the end of the road. Henleaze is where Bristol families move when the terrace gets too small, and it is as quiet, safe and unexciting as that makes it sound — which for a lot of people is exactly the point.

BristolOuter

The northern end of the Gloucester Road corridor, where the independents thin out and the houses get bigger. Horfield Common, a station within walking distance and easy reach of both the aerospace belt and the city make it one of the more practical family choices in Bristol.

Bath and North East SomersetOuter

Exactly halfway between Bristol and Bath, on the line that serves both, which makes it the obvious answer for a household split between the two cities. A pleasant if unremarkable town in its own right, with the Avon and the Chew running through it.

South GloucestershireOuter

A former coal and boot-making town that has never quite decided whether it is part of Bristol. It has a proper high street, the Railway Path on its northern edge, and the cheapest houses with gardens within a half-hour bus of the centre.

BristolOuter

Up the hill from Totterdown, with long views north across the city and a mix of interwar semis and terraces that still represents one of the better value-per-square-foot deals in Bristol. Redcatch Park gives it a centre; the Wells Road gives it traffic.

BristolOuter

Two stations on the Severn Beach line, the Avon Gorge on one side and Blaise on the other, and rents that belong to a different city. The catch is the line itself — half-hourly, and it stops running early enough to shape your evenings.

BristolOuter

Church Road has quietly become one of the better places to eat in east Bristol, and St George Park gives the area a proper green centre. It is Easton without the intensity and with more space, at a price that has not yet caught up with either.

BristolOuter

A village that kept its centre — a green, a medieval church, a run of independent shops — and was then surrounded by the city. It is the most self-contained place in Bristol, which is either its great appeal or the reason you would not live there.

Bath and North East SomersetFringe

A World Heritage city of about ninety thousand people, which means the entire centre is walkable in twenty minutes and every one of those minutes is spent looking at Bath stone. The rents reflect that, and so does the tourist volume.

Bath and North East SomersetFringe

Across the Avon from the centre, with Widcombe's small parade of shops, the canal towpath and the climb up to Bathwick Hill and the university. Five minutes from Bath Spa station and considerably quieter than anywhere on the other bank.

North SomersetFringe

A Victorian seaside town that never went downmarket — the pier is Grade I listed, Hill Road has genuine independents, and the seafront is a working promenade rather than an arcade strip. The price is that the nearest station is in Yatton, four miles inland.

Bath and North East SomersetFringe

The old Somerset coalfield, ten miles south of Bath and a world away from it. The cheapest rents anywhere in this region by a wide margin, on the Mendip fringe, and with no railway — the line closed in 1966 and the bus takes fifty minutes to Bath.

North SomersetFringe

A station on the Bristol–Weston line and a well-regarded secondary school are the two things that bring people here. Nailsea itself is a 1960s expansion of an old glassmaking village; Backwell next door is the older and prettier half.

Bath and North East SomersetFringe

Bath's Victorian terraces rather than its Georgian crescents, and the city's student and young-professional quarter as a result. Moorland Road is a working local high street and the station puts Bristol twenty minutes away, at rents a long way below the centre.

North SomersetFringe

A power-station town rebuilt as a marina, and now the fastest-growing settlement in the region — twenty thousand people with no railway. The rail link has been promised for two decades and construction has started; until it opens, the A369 into Bristol decides your morning.

South GloucestershireFringe

A genuine market town with a castle, a medieval high street and an unusually strong independent retail scene for its size. It is also the least well-connected place covered here — the railway closed in 1944 and nothing has replaced it.

North SomersetFringe

A large Victorian resort of eighty thousand people with two stations, three miles of beach and the cheapest rents anywhere in the region. It has the problems that go with a seaside town whose season ended decades ago, and it is honest about them.

South GloucestershireFringe

A post-war new town with a station that reaches Temple Meads in under half an hour, which is the whole argument for it. Chipping Sodbury next door supplies the market-town charm Yate itself was never designed to have.