Egham is a good place to live, a notch above average, and best for people who want Windsor Great Park on their walks and can choose a house the river leaves alone. It is a small Surrey town with a university on the hill, a railway line through the middle and the Thames along the bottom edge. Life runs on two calendars here, the academic year and the river's, and the buyers who settle in happily have learned both.
The planning paperwork is heavier than a town of this size suggests. The area mapped around Egham holds 135 listed buildings, three of them Grade I and eight Grade II*, plus five conservation areas named for Egham, Egham Hythe, Englefield Green, Thorpe and Staines. Inside those boundaries a new front window, a felled tree or a side extension can need consent, and on a listed building almost every change does. Buyers planning to knock through and glaze the back of an old cottage will spend their first year learning how the council's heritage team thinks; the post-war semis are where the extensions get waved through.
Surrey Police recorded crime in Egham at about 97 per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 12% above the Runnymede average. The mix leans towards the town centre. Shoplifting made up about 12% of recorded crime against 8% nationally, and public order offences 9% against 7%. A high street with a station and a large student population tends to produce that profile, so it says more about the shops than about the closes behind them.
Royal Holloway is the fact that bends every other number. The university is at Englefield Green, inside this boundary, and 3,260 residents live in halls and other communal homes. That drags the typical age down to 32, a figure that describes term time as much as the settled town. About 57% of households own their home. The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income at around £67,000 in the financial year to March 2023, which is comfortable Surrey money even with the students in the average. The town suits young professionals and university staff who like a bit of life on the high street, and it suits families who can live with a few thousand neighbours who keep later hours.
Egham Rail Station is on the line between London Waterloo and Reading, though at the 2021 census only 3% of working residents commuted by train. About 40% worked from home and roughly the same share drove. Three level crossings cut through the town, and those two figures may not be unrelated. There are 106 bus stops, averaging about six buses an hour at peak, and every stop with timetable data has a weekend service. Gigabit broadband reaches about 83% of premises and superfast about 99%, so the home-working crowd is well served.
Flood risk is where Egham asks the most of a buyer. On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 29% of the area falls in Flood Zone 3 and another 18% in Zone 2. Counting postcodes instead, about 29% are at high risk on at least one flood indicator, surface water included, and a quarter fall inside recorded historic flood outlines. The army was deployed to help with defences around Egham Hythe and Runnymede in the winter storms that began in 2013. Put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service and get an insurance quote early, because "riverside" in a property description is a location and a warning in the same word.
The Land Registry's median sale price was about £450,000 across 217 sales in the year to May 2026. Flats went for about £263,000, terraced houses about £400,000, semis about £480,000 and detached houses about £705,000. Band D is the most common council tax band and only about 10% of homes are in bands A or B. William Chaloner ran a coining operation in Egham in his day, which remains the only recorded method of making the place cheap.
Rent across Runnymede, which takes in Chertsey and Virginia Water as well as Egham, was about £1,570 a month in April 2026 on the Office for National Statistics index, 3% lower than a year earlier. Around a quarter of Egham households rent privately, a share the students keep high.
The council-tax list puts flats at about 29% of homes, semis 24%, terraces 21%, detached houses 18% and bungalows 8%, with about 23% built before 1930. On energy certificates, 55% of rated homes reach band C or better and about 11% sit at E or worse. Mains gas heats about 76% of homes and electricity alone about 12%, a figure worth checking on any older flat, since an all-electric system in a draughty building is a running cost the particulars rarely mention.
The surroundings are the reason to put up with the rest. The nearest green space is roughly 170 metres from the average front door, with about 16 within a kilometre, and water is roughly 390 metres away. Windsor Great Park, the Savill Garden and the meadows at Runnymede are all on the doorstep. Cooper's Hill, which John Denham wrote poetry about in the 17th century, rises above the floodplain, and the Air Forces Memorial at Englefield Green looks out towards London. The town has collected an odd crowd over the centuries, from Ruth Bowyer, who sailed with Australia's First Fleet, to the actor Hilda Braid.
Egham is better than the average town and earns it with the park, the meadows and a station on a London line. It suits walkers, home-workers, university people and anyone who buys on the higher ground towards Englefield Green. It suits buyers less if they want a ground-floor flat in Egham Hythe at a bargain price and haven't asked why it is one.