Aberdeen

Granite terraces still dominate the streetscape here, that distinctive grey stone giving even ordinary residential roads a solid, formal look, and it's a working city first — oil and gas offices, university buildings, harbourside industry — rather than a place styled for visitors. You'll notice the mix on any main road: professionals in their thirties and forties, a substantial student population, and the kind of granite tenement flats that have housed generations of Aberdonians without much needing to change.

The numbers back up that sense of a settled, working population — median age of 38.8 is younger than the Scotland-wide average, which tracks with the university and the offshore industry both pulling in people of working age. Housing here is the real headline: a median price around £134,500 sits well below what you'd expect for a city of this size, and against a national picture where deprivation is measured decile by decile, Aberdeen's decile 7 places it comfortably among the less deprived parts of Scotland. Council tax band D bills run slightly above the national median, a reminder that affordability here is about purchase price more than ongoing costs. With 62 schools across the city, there's real choice for families, though the absence of Ofsted-style ratings in Scotland means you're better off asking around locally than relying on a single grade.

Green space is where Aberdeen quietly overperforms — 520 sites and over 1,600 hectares of it, which for a city this size is a lot of room to walk off a Sunday roast or let a dog run. The overall character grade lands at a solid B+, and digging into the sub-grades tells the real story: the environment grade is the standout at A, connectivity, housing and nightlife all sit at a healthy B+, and it's safety and health that trail behind at B — not a bad mark by any means, but the one soft spot in an otherwise strong pattern. Full-fibre broadband reaches nearly 92% of the city, which matters if you're working from home some of the week, and population density is notably lower than the national average, so it doesn't have that shoulder-to-shoulder feel some Scottish cities carry.