Stonehouse is a well-priced valley town where nearly a third of postcodes carry a high flood risk on at least one measure, and for a buyer that one fact decides which streets are worth the money. The river zones cover only a sliver of it. Most of the risk comes from rain with nowhere to go. Get the street right and the rest of the town gives you more than it charges for.
The Environment Agency's postcode indicators, which count surface water alongside rivers, put about 31% of Stonehouse postcodes at high risk on at least one of them, 33% at medium and 52% at low. In the river-and-sea flood zones the picture is far smaller: about 4% of the area is in Flood Zone 3, nothing is in Flood Zone 2, and the climate-adjusted zone stretches only to about 4%. The agency has 11 recorded flood events on its books, the latest in July 2007, when the main river overflowed its channel with no raised defences to stop it. The Lower Severn Internal Drainage Board looks after about 4% of postcodes, mostly on the flat ground towards the motorway. The river last made its point by simply running out of room.
The Land Registry's last twelve months, to May 2026, put the typical sale at £310,000 across 112 sales. Detached houses went for about £425,000, semis for £310,000, terraces for £250,000, and the nine flats that sold fetched a median of about £156,000. On council tax, Band B is the most common, and 44% of homes sit in Bands A or B. John Maltravers got the whole manor in the 1300s for a single rose a year, and nobody in Stonehouse has been offered terms like that since, though the bills here come close for the county.
Typical private rent across the Stroud district runs at about £1,040 a month as of April 2026, an authority-wide figure that blends this town with Stroud itself and the villages up the valleys. Nobody here is renting the average.
The Valuation Office's list of every dwelling shows a town built for families who like a garden fence. Semis make up 29% of homes, terraces 27%, detached houses 22%, bungalows 11% and flats 10%. Only 18% were built before 1930, and the energy certificates point to a post-war town, with about 64% of certificated homes rated A to C. Mains gas heats 79% of homes. The valley's grand stone mill houses are mostly somebody else's postcode; Stonehouse is where the people who worked in them were eventually given cavity walls.
Police.uk records put crime at about 50 offences per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 9% above the Stroud district average. That is a published rate for the whole town, and the gap is small enough that one busy summer on the high street could close it or double it.
About 68% of households own their home, and the typical resident is 43. The Office for National Statistics models gross household income at about £54,000 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area's three middle-layer neighbourhoods. The industrial parks off Oldends Lane, home to the Severnside Dairy and engineering firms including Renishaw, mean this is a town that still makes things, which is rarer in this part of Gloucestershire than the tea rooms suggest.
There are 106 listed buildings in and around Stonehouse, five of them Grade II* and the rest Grade II, with none at Grade I. Stanley Mills is the one conservation area. Most of the post-war stock can be extended without a planning officer measuring your window frames, and the older buildings cluster around St Cyr's Church and Stonehouse Court. Arthur Winterbotham had Stonehouse Court refitted to a Lutyens design in 1906, watched fire gut the new interior in 1908, and paid to do it all again. That is about the level of patience a listed-building consent asks of anyone today.
Stonehouse Rail Station is in the town, and yet fewer than one working resident in a hundred took the train to work at the last census. Driving accounts for 55%, and 29% worked from home. There are 81 bus stops, averaging 24 weekday departures each. Gigabit broadband reaches 85% of premises and superfast 99%, and every postcode has 4G or 5G from at least one operator. The Department for Transport's modelled times, from 2019, put the nearest town centre 15 minutes away by car or 27 by public transport, and hospital about 29 minutes by car. The bus figures have had seven years to age, and in this valley that rarely goes in the passenger's favour. A station that the town mostly drives past is still worth having when the motorway clogs.
Green space is where Stonehouse does best. The nearest park or open space is about 165 metres from the average front door, with 18 within a kilometre, and water is about 330 metres away, usually the Stroudwater Canal, which has run through the old manor lands since 1779. A small corner of the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty reaches into the area, and the National Cycle Network is about 560 metres from a typical home. The surrounding villages, King's Stanley and Leonard Stanley to the south, Eastington to the west, Frocester and Nympsfield under the escarpment, Middleyard, Haresfield, Standish, Whitminster and Arlingham out towards the Severn, give the town a back garden most cities would sell a motorway junction for. Stonehouse already has the motorway junction too.
This is a town for families and couples who want a semi with a garden, a canal walk before work and the motorway close enough to make the commute bearable. It is a poor fit for anyone after period character on every corner, or who wants to live without a car, because the station gets more admirers than passengers.
Flood risk is the thing that costs you here, and it lands street by street. A house on the high ground near the escarpment villages and one by the canal can share a postcode district and nothing else when the rain comes. Choose the street with the water in mind and Stonehouse is better than average, a sensibly priced, well-connected town with the countryside right outside the door. Ignore it and the canal will make the case against the house for you.