Durham: a cathedral on a rock, and the county around it.
Durham wraps its centre around a peninsula in a loop of the Wear — the Norman cathedral and castle above, the university colleges below, the narrow medieval streets between. It is small, steep and much-visited, and its settled money sits beyond the centre in the villages and country houses of the Durham dales and the coast, with the East Coast Main Line keeping the region connected.
So our Durham work is mostly residential and vehicular: protective surveys for the dales and village houses, secure driving through a peninsula centre whose geography limits the ways in, and discreet close protection for university and cathedral occasions where a visible presence would be entirely the wrong note. The register is quiet, matched to a small city that would notice anything else.
An illustrative scenario
The kind of survey the dales reward: one that turns a remote country house’s isolation from a vulnerability into a genuine advantage.
Photo: Market Square Durham by wfmillar · CC BY-SA 2.0
Local context — the Durham area
Recorded crime here is modest for a university city; the county villages where our residential work sits are quieter still. Most of our work reflects that — prevention and discretion rather than a response to any wave of incidents.
Crime figures: data.police.uk. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Location point: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Property figures: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Nearby
We cover these from the same team and the same vehicles, so a detail that starts in Durham can move between them without a handover.