The Manchester Evening News has brought out a nice tool that allows you to compare crime in your postcode area to the rest of the country – you can try it here.

Here are two examples from either end of the A6 in Hazel Grove:

Simpsons Corner, near the start of the new road to the airport:

Around Stepping Hill Hospital:

What are the areas?

When you get crime figures like this, it’s not the figures for your road but for the area around it. It’s based on something called a Local layer Super Output Area – which is used by Government statisticians.

Say you want to know what the hospital area covers – that’s given on the MEN website as “Stockport 027B”. So you can Google “Stockport 027B LSOA” and there’s a site called doogal.co.uk which will show you a map that looks something like this.