West Common Harpenden, St Albans

Sales on this street

Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, sales registered up to 28 August 2026, loaded 28 October 2026. Sales reach the register two weeks to two months after completion, so the last two months are incomplete. Matched by postcode and street name.

Energy performance certificates

Source: Energy Performance of Buildings Register (MHCLG), register as at 1 November 2026. Latest certificate per address; certificates last ten years, so the oldest here dates from December 2008 and some homes have none. Address data © Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, shown for understanding the energy efficiency of buildings only.

77 homes with a current certificate; median floor area 90 m². Most common: House, mid-terrace (22); House, detached (20); House, semi-detached (20). Built: before 1900 (31); 1900-1929 (15); 1930-1949 (8). Tenure at assessment: owner-occupied (38); rented (private) (27); rented (social) (1).

Council tax

What each band costs in St Albans in 2026-27: Band D £2,419 a year on average, including the police, fire and any county and parish charges.

Homes by band in the neighbourhoods around this street: most are in band G (30% of about 1,900 homes).

Sources: Valuation Office Agency, Council Tax: stock of properties, homes at 31 March 2026 (counts rounded to the nearest 10; some small counts withheld), for the 2 neighbourhoods (census areas of about 700 homes each) around it, not just this street; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, council tax levels 2026-27. Bands are charged as fixed shares of Band D; the actual bill depends on the parish and on discounts such as the single-person discount. Check a home's own band with the official council tax band checker.

Planning and heritage

• Conservation area: yes, Harpenden (council page). Extensions, demolition, some windows and doors, and work on trees need consent.
• Listed buildings on or by this street: 6.
• Article 4 direction (removing permitted development rights): none recorded, though not every council has published theirs.
• Tree preservation orders: 118 protected trees on or by this street.
• Green belt: yes, St Albans.

Listed buildings

• 15 AND 16, WEST COMMON, grade II
• 44, WEST COMMON WAY, grade II
• FLOWTON PRIORY, grade II
• NUMBER 1 THATCHED COTTAGES, grade II
• RIVERS LODGE (ROTHAMSTED EXPERIMENTAL STATION) (INCLUDING FRONT RAILINGS), grade II
• THE WHITE HORSE PUBLIC HOUSE, grade II

Source: planning.data.gov.uk (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), compiled from councils and, for listed buildings, Historic England's National Heritage List. Conservation areas, Article 4 directions, tree preservation areas and the green belt are checked at each postcode's centre. Listed buildings and protected trees are counted on or by this street. Councils publish Article 4 directions, tree preservation orders and brownfield registers to different standards, and some not yet. Planning applications are not here: there is no national open record of them yet.

Roadworks

Planned, as of 31 October 2026

• 4 December 2026 to 8 December 2026: AFFINITY WATER - C, Utility repair and maintenance works, give and take, on the footway (minor works)

Finished in the last three months

• 12 October 2026 to 15 October 2026: HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL, Highway repair and maintenance works, road closure, on the footway (major works)
• 28 September 2026 to 30 September 2026: AFFINITY WATER - C, Utility repair and maintenance works, give and take, on the carriageway (immediate - urgent works)

Source: Department for Transport, Street Manager open data, permits and works up to 31 October 2026. It is published once a month, so works arranged or started since then are not shown, and dates are the ones planned unless the works have started or finished. Emergency works are often permitted after they begin.

Flood risk

Rivers, the sea or surface water: in this street's postcodes, 6 addresses are in areas at high risk, 25 at medium risk and 25 at low risk. Each address counts once, at the higher of its rivers-and-sea and surface-water risk.

Rivers and the sea alone: no home is in an area at risk.

High: 3.3% (1 in 30) or more chance of flooding a year. Medium: 1% to 3.3%. Low: 0.1% to 1%. Very low: under 0.1%. The rivers and sea figures allow for flood defences. Counts cover whole postcodes, which can include other streets.

Flood zone for planning: no postcode centre on this street is in flood zone 2 or 3.

Sources: Environment Agency Flood risk: postcode search tool data (loaded 29 October 2026), Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea: postcodes in areas at risk (loaded 29 October 2026) and Flood Map for Planning (loaded 28 October 2026). Flood zones are checked at each postcode's centre point. These are models of areas, which their publishers say are not suitable for showing whether an individual property is at risk, and they do not cover flooding from sewers or drains. Check an address on the official long-term flood risk service.

© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026. All rights reserved. Some features are based on digital spatial data from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, © NERC (CEH); the postcode data is produced in part from PAF® and Multiple Residence Data, © Royal Mail Group Limited.

Height above sea level

The street's 249 addresses are between 111 m and 129 m above sea level (119 m on average); the ground rises about 18 m from the lowest to the highest.

Source: Ordnance Survey, OS Terrain 50, July 2026: the height of the ground on a 50 m grid, read at each address, in metres above Ordnance Datum (mean sea level at Newlyn). It is the lie of the land, not floor or threshold levels, and is accurate to a few metres. Being low-lying is not in itself a flood risk; the flood section above says what the flood maps show.

Broadband

Source: Ofcom Connected Nations, data as at January 2026. Percentages are of premises in each postcode that can get the service, not take-up or speed achieved.

Getting around

Sources: Department for Transport, NaPTAN (every public transport stop), as at 31 October 2026; Office of Rail and Road, Estimates of station usage 2024–25 (which stations are on the National Rail network, and their journeys: entries and exits in the year to March); OurAirports (public domain, kept by volunteers); car parks and charging points from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others: not an official register, so some will be missing, private or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the middle of the street, not routes, and say nothing about how often anything runs. Stations opened since the end of ORR's year appear when ORR publishes the next one, each December; heritage railways are left out.

Local services

Sources: NHS Organisation Data Service, as at 31 October 2026: GP practices, community pharmacies and dental practices with an NHS contract, open now, each placed at the centre of its postcode; hospitals are NHS trust and Welsh health board sites named as hospitals, and may not have an emergency department. Police stations and cash machines from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings: not an official register, so some will be missing or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the middle of the street. Nothing here says whether a practice is taking new patients or a dentist new NHS patients.

Parks and green space

Source: Ordnance Survey, OS Open Greenspace, April 2026: public parks and gardens, play spaces, playing fields and allotments, with their entrances. Distances are straight lines from the middle of the street to a site's nearest entrance (or its edge where none is recorded), not walking routes; sizes are the area OS maps for each site. Some sites, such as school playing fields, may not be open to the public.

Within 800 m (0.5 miles): 2 parks and gardens, 42 hectares in all.

Landmarks

The nearest historic landmark is Rothamsted Romano-British cemetery, a scheduled monument, 1.8 km (1.1 miles) north-west. 11 listed buildings are within 1 km (0.6 miles).

Sources: Historic England's registers through planning.data.gov.uk (MHCLG), and Cadw through DataMapWales (Welsh Government): World Heritage Sites within 10 km (6.2 miles), battlefields within 5 km (3.1 miles), registered parks and gardens within 3 km (1.9 miles), scheduled monuments within 2 km (1.2 miles), and Grade I and II* listed buildings within 1 km (0.6 miles). Ordnance Survey, OS Open Names, October 2026: named hills, valleys, lakes, woods, wetlands and coast (it has no rivers). Distances are in a straight line to the middle of each site, and being on a register does not mean there is public access.

Air quality

Source: Defra, modelled background air pollution, annual means for 2024, for the 1 km square that holds the middle of the street. These are background levels, away from the kerb: beside a busy road nitrogen dioxide in particular can be several times higher. UK limits are the legal annual limits for England and Wales; the World Health Organization's 2021 guidelines are much stricter, and most towns and cities are above them.

All three are within the UK legal limits; PM2.5 is above the WHO guideline, as in most towns and cities.

Road, rail and aircraft noise

Source: Defra, strategic noise mapping Round 4 (England), modelled for 2021 and published in December 2023, and its airport maps of the same round for the fifteen largest English airports, published in April 2026: Lden, the average sound level over a whole day with extra weight for the evening and night, on a 10 m grid, read at each address. These are models of traffic, not measurements; they leave out smaller airports and airfields, industry and neighbours, and a room at the back of a house is often much quieter than the front. The World Health Organization's guidelines are 53 dB for road traffic, 54 dB for railways and 45 dB for aircraft (below the lowest level shown here).

87 of the street's 248 addresses are modelled at 55 dB or more from road traffic, and 4 from railways, above the WHO guidelines.

Climate, daylight and earthquakes

Monthly temperatures and rainfall, sunrise and sunset through the year, and earthquakes recorded nearby since 1970 are much the same across the area, so they are worked out once for St Albans: see them on the St Albans page.

Nearest schools

Source: Get Information About Schools (Department for Education), 3 November 2026; Ofsted monthly management information as at September 2026. Distances are straight lines from the middle of the street to the school; catchments and admissions are not shown. Since November 2025 Ofsted gives report-card grades by area, not one overall grade; older grades stand until a school is re-inspected.

Food hygiene ratings nearby

Source: Food Standards Agency, Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, extract of 3 November 2026. Each rating is shown with the date it was given; a business may have been re-inspected since the extract. Within 500 m (0.3 miles) of the middle of the street.

Crime within 250 m

Source: data.police.uk street-level crime, September 2025 to August 2026. Police forces move every crime to the nearest of about 760,000 anonymised map points before publishing, so these are crimes near this street, not on it, and a busy point can collect crimes from a wider area. Counts are of records, not convictions.

Most of these are attached to: On or near Hatching Green (3); On or near St Albans Road (2).

People and work

Source: ONS Census 2021, taken on 21 March 2021, for the 4 Output Areas (small census areas of about 125 households each) that this street's postcodes are in: 1,432 residents in 617 households. The census was taken during a lockdown, so working from home is high and travel to work low compared with now. ONS swaps a few records between neighbouring areas and adds small amounts of noise to counts to protect privacy, so small differences mean little. Industry is not published for areas this small.

Who lives here

Homes

Work and commuting

Education and languages

Deprivation

The 2 neighbourhoods around this street are in deciles 9 to 10 of 10 on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, where 1 is the most deprived tenth of England's 33,755 neighbourhoods and 10 the least.

Source: English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), by LSOA (about 1,500 people), through the ONS Postcode Directory. The index combines income, employment, health, education, crime, housing and living environment; it ranks areas against each other and does not describe any one household. Ranks in England and Wales are worked out separately and cannot be compared.

What has changed

• Roadworks Street works permit: AFFINITY WATER - C: Utility repair and maintenance works, 4 December 2026 to 8 December 2026 (give and take) found 3 November 2026

Everything that has changed on and near this street

Postcodes on this street

Source: ONS Postcode Directory August 2026, ONS UPRN Directory September 2026, OS Open Linked Identifiers September 2026. A postcode can cover more than one street; the share shows how many of its addresses are on this one.

• AL5 2JQ: 49 addresses of 53 in the postcode
• AL5 2JN: 31 addresses
• AL5 2JW: 31 addresses of 34 in the postcode
• AL5 2FN: 26 addresses
• AL5 2FL: 25 addresses
• AL5 2JD: 23 addresses of 24 in the postcode
• AL5 2LD: 20 addresses of 22 in the postcode
• AL5 2JH: 17 addresses of 19 in the postcode
• AL5 2AS: 12 addresses
• AL5 2DT: 3 addresses of 33 in the postcode
• AL5 2JG: 3 addresses
• AL5 2AR: 2 addresses of 3 in the postcode
• AL5 2JJ: 2 addresses
• AL5 1DT: 1 address of 4 in the postcode
• AL5 2AJ: 1 address of 12 in the postcode
• AL5 2JS: 1 address of 17 in the postcode
• AL5 2LB: 1 address of 19 in the postcode

Nearby streets

Hatching Green Close · Hatching Green · West Common · Flowton Grove · Greyfriars Lane · Manor Close · High Elms · Rothamsted View · Geescroft Walk · The Warren

All the streets in AL5 and across St Albans.