Since 2013, a team of expert judges on The Sunday Times has used local knowledge and critical acclaim to come up with a list of the best places to live in Britain.
Last year’s winner, North Berwick, East Lothian, was praised by our panel for its sparkling seafront and humming high street — and lobster for lunch.
But this Christmas, we at the Times data team decided to try out a different approach. What if, instead of using our esteemed judges, we let data decide the best place to live?
After all, many of us already use property portals to pick homes close to railway stations or within a select budget. But can we translate what makes a place “nice” into facts and figures?
To do this, we combined nine different data sets covering a range of different categories for every local authority in Britain. We looked at crime rates in each area. We measured education through looking at Ofsted reports and “Progress 8”, a measure of how much children improve during secondary school. We used three NHS measures: satisfaction with GPs, waiting times and treatment targets. We rolled in the number of listed buildings per area, the number of community-listed companies, and how many parks with Green Flags there were.
Each area was ranked equally based on these measures, and the house price of each area calculated too.
So which area won?
Step forward the London borough of Richmond, which, according to all of the measures, is the best place in Britain. Great schools, 80 per cent GP satisfaction and the lowest crime rate in London, Richmond has it all — if you can stomach the £748,000 average house price, which is 42 per cent higher than the London average.
• Richmond upon Thames named Britain’s happiest place to live
When compiling the list, we worried that all of the top table would be concentrated in posh southern areas.
And Cheltenham, our second-placed data pick, certainly fits that bill. A historic Regency town in Gloucestershire with a grand pump room and world-famous racecourse, it also has some of the lowest NHS waiting times in England.
Clitheroe town centre in the Ribble Valley, which has the second-lowest crime rate in the UK
ALAMY
But there was plenty of geographic variety across the rest of the top ten. The Ribble Valley district, in Lancashire, was in fifth place thanks to great public services and the second-lowest crime rate in the country. Houses here too cost a relatively modest £274,000 on average.
In fact the good news for data-driven house hunters is that overall, there is only a very weak relationship between house prices and our ranking.
Fylde, also in Lancashire, comes in at sixth place in our rankings, where homes cost £242,000 on average.
So far, so good. But there are plenty of limitations in the data.
One obvious problem was geographical coverage. We picked local authorities to make the comparisons easier — there isn’t great data at the village or neighbourhood level — but as a result, some very different-sized places are compared. That’s why we have Cornwall, a massive county, vying with Cheltenham, a modest-sized town, for the top spot.
Furthermore, the NHS data in particular did not always map neatly into those local authority areas.
But perhaps the biggest issue came when we wanted to compare between nations. Although we originally wanted to make a big UK-wide list, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England all count things in slightly different way — so we had to keep them separate.
Ceredigion was named the best place to live in Wales
ALAMY
Our Welsh winner is the local authority of Ceredigion, which boasts low crime rates, low NHS waiting times and a lot of community interest groups.
In Northern Ireland, Fermanagh and Omagh came out top, largely thanks to the best NHS service in the nation (although Northern Irish waiting times tend to be much higher than English ones).
Our Scotland table, meanwhile, slightly exposed the limitations of the data. Na h-Eileanan Siar, Orkney and Shetland topped our rankings with great public services, strong communities and cheap houses to boot.
There’s just one catch: they’re incredibly remote islands that many people wouldn’t want to move to.
And the thing is, not everyone wants the same thing. If we weight our ranking slightly differently, for example, and prioritise public services, it is the London borough of Kingston-upon-Thames which actually triumphs over its neighbour, Richmond.
Similarly, prioritising culture (that is, listed buildings, parks and community interest groups) results in Westminster coming out on top. Which might be nice if you have a million to spend, but otherwise has one of the highest crime rates in Britain.
In many cases, places that are good by one measure are not so good for others.
Take Northern Ireland: Fermanagh and Omagh have been best overall, but when it comes to green spaces, it does poorly: actually, Antrim and Newtownabbey has the most Green Flag parks, but it’s ranked second-last overall.
Data can get you some of the way there — but there’s no need to retire our judging panel just yet.
Are there any other datasets you think we should have used? Let us know in the comments