Yes, as long as you drive and never need to upload anything large in a hurry. Crime runs well below the rest of the district. Almost every home has a patch of green a short walk from the door. Full fibre has barely turned up. It's a handsome, safe town that happens to sit in the slow lane.
The high street suggests a Georgian film set, but the housing is more mixed than that. About 41% of the homes on the council-tax valuation list were built before 1930. Among homes with an energy certificate, the biggest single slice is post-war. Semis make up about 29% of the stock, terraces 26%, detached houses 21%, flats 19% and bungalows 4%. On energy certificates, about 41% of certificated homes reach band C or better, 34% sit at D and 25% are rated E or worse. About 72% of homes heat with mains gas and 16% run on electricity alone. That second figure is the one to check before a viewing, not after it. An old cottage on electric heating turns the viewing into a quiet talk about your winter budget.
Prices come from a small sample. The Land Registry recorded 19 sales in the twelve months to mid-May 2026, at a median of about £375,000. The spread by type is wide. Three detached houses sold at a median of about £990,000, six semis at around £395,000, seven terraces at around £360,000 and three flats at about £240,000. With so few sales, one big house changing hands can move the median more than a year of market mood. The most common council-tax band is C, and about 18% of homes sit in bands A or B. That's a thin budget-end for a town that looks this expensive from the pavement.
Rent is harder to pin down. The typical private rent across the Chichester area was about £1,320 a month as of April 2026. That's a district-wide figure, not Petworth's own. The town's rental market is too small to produce a reliable number of its own, so it borrows one from a district that includes Chichester itself. Treat it as a starting point for negotiation, not a quote.
Safety is where Petworth does well. The published crime rate for the year to May 2026 was about 53 per 1,000 residents, roughly 35% below the Chichester district average. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 31% of recorded crime, against 16% nationally. Violence and sexual offences account for about 22%, against 35% nationally. The totals are small enough that a handful of incidents moves those shares by several points, so read the mix as this year's pattern rather than a permanent feature. Sussex Police, the force for the whole county rather than this town, charged about 10% of offences over the same period, against about 12% nationally. The town is quiet. The charge rate is a county-wide figure, not a local one.
Getting around is the weak point, and it's not a subtle one. About 54% of working residents drive to work, 25% work from home and about 1% commute by train. That's a decent turnout for a town whose passenger line closed in 1955. There are 14 bus stops. The ten with timetable data average 13 weekday departures each, and all ten have a weekend service. Superfast broadband reaches about 98% of premises, but gigabit covers only about 3%. Mobile signal from all four operators covers about 98%. The Department for Transport's 2019 modelling puts the nearest hospital about 36 minutes away by car and about 49 minutes by public transport. The public transport figures date faster than the road ones, so treat them with more caution. If your job means large file transfers, the town will test your patience daily.
The surroundings are the other side of that trade. Homes sit on average about 80 metres from the nearest green space, with around 13 green spaces within a kilometre. The nearest water is on average about 400 metres away. Petworth Park, laid out by Capability Brown and now looked after by the National Trust, sits beside the town. On flood risk, about 8% of postcodes are rated high on at least one flood indicator, and that includes surface water. None of Petworth's postcodes fall in the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones 2 or 3. Surface water is the thing to check for a specific address, especially on lower ground.
Heritage shapes what you can do to a house here. Petworth has 188 listed buildings: two at Grade I, 13 at Grade II* and 173 at Grade II. The town centre is a conservation area. Petworth House, its stables and its main gate on Park Road are all listed. In practice, windows, extensions, rooflines and even paint colours on the older streets go through a consent process that runs at the council's pace, not yours. Buying a listed house here is less like owning it and more like minding it, with a planning officer as your joint signatory.
The town is settled and middle-aged. About 52% of households own their home. The median resident is 49. Modelled gross household income came to about £58,000 in the financial year to March 2023. Every postcode sits near road noise of 65 decibels or more, because two A-roads cross in the middle of town. Residents learn the traffic's daily rhythm the way coastal towns learn the tides. This page also covers the surrounding villages of Graffham, on the South Downs escarpment, Lodsworth and Northchapel, up the A283 towards the Surrey border. They're quieter and greener still, and further from everything else.
Petworth suits people who work from home on ordinary broadband, or who drive and don't mind it. It suits buyers who want old buildings, a walled park and low crime, and who see a planning application as part of owning a period house rather than an insult. It suits people who came for somewhere calm and meant it.
It doesn't suit anyone who needs a train, a fast upload or a hospital nearby. It doesn't suit buyers who plan to rip out sash windows on a listed street and are surprised when the council has an opinion. A car-free life here is possible on paper and wearing in practice.
Petworth is a good place to live, a notch above average, for the right buyer. Its real strength is its surroundings: green space on the doorstep, parkland beside the town and crime well below the district average. The weak spot is transport and connectivity: one-percent rail use, near-absent gigabit broadband and a hospital more than half an hour's drive away. Come for the park and the quiet, and bring the car keys.