Safest areas in Bristol (and the ones with more reported crime)

CrimeRate’s independent analysis, already cited in our general Bristol post, names Bristol as Avon and Somerset’s highest-crime location and Bath as its safest — two cities under one force. We already had three verified July 2026 samples for Bristol itself (Harbourside, Stokes Croft, Westbury-on-Trym); this post adds Bath, the named-safest city, plus Weston-super-Mare as a third town for comparison.

What one month actually showed

Each figure is every recorded crime within a small area (roughly 300 metres across, kept small enough to stay well under the police API’s 500-record cap) around one representative postcode, for July 2026, counted by hand from the raw data.

Where the reputation and the sample agree — and where they don’t

Westbury-on-Trym, a Bristol suburb rather than one of CrimeRate’s two named cities, was by far the quietest sample here at a single incident — a useful reminder that a “highest-crime” city label describes the city as a whole, not every postcode inside it.

Bath is the more surprising result. Named the safest of the two cities over the long run, its central postcode still logged 40 incidents in a month — not far off Bristol’s own Harbourside and city-centre sample of 50, and with a higher share of violent crime (45% against 30%). This does not mean Bath is really as risky as Bristol: both postcodes here were deliberately chosen as each city’s own busy centre, so this is a centre-to-centre comparison, not a city-to-city one, and a long-run force-wide rate is built from far more than one street in one month. What it does show is that “Bath is the safe one” doesn’t automatically mean every part of Bath, including its own shopping and nightlife centre, looks dramatically quieter than the equivalent part of the city rated highest-crime. Weston-super-Mare, meanwhile, looked different in kind as much as scale — half of its incidents were anti-social behaviour rather than violent crime, more in keeping with a seaside town than a nightlife district.

See it for yourself

These open live with both postcodes already loaded, using twelve months of data rather than the single month above:

• Bath centre vs Bristol centre — the named-safest and named-highest-crime cities, centre to centre.
• Bath vs Weston-super-Mare — two towns in the same force, neither named by CrimeRate’s city-level comparison.
• Westbury-on-Trym vs Weston-super-Mare — the quietest sample here against the seaside town.

The limits of this data

This is recorded crime — what was reported and logged, not everything that happened — from one month, in small areas chosen to stay well under the police API’s reporting cap. It is not a verdict on any of these places or the people who live there. For the full force-wide picture, see our Bristol post and the police force crime rate ranking. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.