Leatherhead is a good place to live, mostly because of the Surrey wrapped around it. Green space starts a couple of minutes from almost any front door. Most homes are flats. Crime runs well above the rest of Mole Valley. The town is the base camp, and the hills are why anyone stays.
The housing is mostly flats, and the council-tax list confirms it. About 43% of every home on that list is a flat. Detached, semi-detached and terraced houses each make up around a sixth, and bungalows 5%. A quarter of the stock was built before 1930, which leaves a lot of post-war and later building around an old core. Of the homes with an energy certificate, 60% are rated A to C, 28% D and 12% E or worse. About 75% of households heat with mains gas and 14% use electric-only heating, a figure that matters more in a draughty flat than in a new one. The old Royal School for the Blind on Highlands Road was turned into apartments and now goes by Lavender Court. In Leatherhead, any large building that stands still long enough gets turned into flats.
The Land Registry recorded 141 sales in the year to mid-May 2026, with a median of £367,500. Flats were 72 of those sales, at a median of £257,500. Terraced houses came in at £457,500, semis at £482,500 and detached houses at £917,500. The headline median looks gentle for this part of Surrey because half the sales were flats, and a buyer after a house with a garden should ignore it and start at the second line of that list. Band D is the most common council-tax band, at about £2,520 a year. Only 14% of homes are in bands A or B, so cheap-to-run housing is thin on the ground even here.
About four in ten households rent, 23% privately and 17% from social landlords. For Mole Valley as a whole, typical private rent is about £1,550 a month as of April 2026. The district-wide one-bedroom figure is about £1,135 and the two-bedroom about £1,450. Those are averages for the whole district, villages and Dorking included, and a flat by Leatherhead station may come in on either side of them.
Leatherhead's weak spot is crime. Police.uk puts the rate at about 126 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 89% above the Mole Valley average of about 67. Anti-social behaviour is 19% of the total against 16% nationally, and public order offences 10% against 7%. Violence and shoplifting are close to the national mix. Surrey Police charged 11% of its cases over the same year, a force-wide figure, slightly below the national 12%. A town with a station, a High Street and a leisure centre will always look bad next to a district made up mostly of commons and hillside villages. That comparison is unkind, though the gap is too wide to blame on the comparison alone.
The trains are good. Leatherhead Rail Station runs to London Victoria via Sutton, London Waterloo via Wimbledon, Horsham via Dorking and Guildford via Bookham. At the 2021 census, 4% of working residents went to work by train, 38% drove and 41% worked from home. Four lines to four destinations, and the commuters mostly stayed at home. There are 73 bus stops, and the ones with timetable data average 31 weekday departures each. Superfast broadband reaches 98% of premises and gigabit 69%.
Surroundings are where Leatherhead wins. The average home is about 150 metres from public green space and has around 18 green spaces within a kilometre. On flood risk, 17% of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood indicator, surface water included. The Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping is narrower, with 2% of postcodes in Flood Zone 3 and 1% in Zone 2. The Agency holds 19 recorded flood events, the latest in January 2014, when the River Mole overtopped its channel. The town sits where the chalk of the North Downs dips under London Clay, which explains the springs and the high water table. Every postcode also carries a class 3 shrink-swell rating for that clay. The flood map is the one check to run on any address near the Mole or in a dip, because surface water ignores the river zones entirely.
There are 99 listed buildings: five Grade II* and 94 Grade II, with none at Grade I. The town centre is the Leatherhead conservation area, so replacing windows or a shopfront there means a conversation with Mole Valley's planners first. The wider area holds five scheduled monuments, among them the medieval moated site at The Mounts on Pachesham Farm. In 1393 its tenant, William Wimbledon, defaulted on the rent and was accused of taking the manor buildings apart. It was Leatherhead's first recorded unauthorised works, and the conservation officers have had a point ever since.
About 58% of households own their home, the median resident is 40 and 36% of households are one person living alone. The Office for National Statistics models gross household income at about £66,500 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That is a comfortable working town of mixed ages, without the money of the hills just outside it.
This page also covers Fetcham, across the Mole to the west, and Great Bookham and Little Bookham further along the spring line. They are where the houses, the gardens and the bigger price tags mostly are, and they share Leatherhead's shops and station.
Leatherhead suits people who want Surrey countryside on the doorstep and a train line in four directions, and who are happy in a flat or a modest house to get them. A remote worker who walks the North Downs at lunchtime and goes into London once a week would struggle to find a better arrangement for the money.
It suits people less well if they want a pretty centre and a quiet Saturday night on the High Street. Anyone who wants the village feel should look at Fetcham or the Bookhams first and come into Leatherhead for the trains.
Sir Thomas Bloodworth, Lord Mayor of London during the Great Fire of 1666, lived at Thorncroft Manor, so the town has a long record of taking in people with a London problem behind them. Harold Auten, awarded the Victoria Cross in the First World War, was born here. Michael Caine has lived in Leatherhead and is patron of the Leatherhead Drama Festival.
Leatherhead is above average overall, for reasons a long way from the High Street. Its strength is the green space and countryside a short walk from almost every door. Its weak spot is safety, with recorded crime far above the rest of the district. Live in the town, and spend your free time in the hills around it.