Leicester
City · 368,570 people live here · 56 areas
Check Local Score for Leicester as a whole: 52, fair, better than 1 in 10 cities. 60 is typical for the country.
Summary · written from the figures for Leicester
Terraced streets dominate here — red-brick rows running off the main roads, split between owner-occupiers who've stayed put for decades and a steady churn of renters and students drawn in by De Montfort University. It's a young city by feel as much as by number: a median age in the early thirties, dense terraces packed at over 5,000 people per square kilometre, and a population that keeps the corner shops and takeaways busier than the wine bars. This isn't a place that performs for visitors; it just gets on with itself.
The practical picture is workable rather than glamorous. Leicester Rail Station puts you on a direct line into the national network, and with over 1,500 local stops and two rail stations serving the city, getting around without a car is realistic. Schools are more mixed than the city's overall grade suggests — the average Ofsted rating sits right on the national norm, and while Sparkenhoe Community Primary carries a Good rating, the standout Outstanding options (Catherine Infant School, Castle Mead Academy) are the ones worth checking your specific street against, since quality varies block by block. Housing is where Leicester quietly outperforms its reputation: a median price around £235,000 is well under the national average and roughly in line with the regional one, terraced houses lead the market, and freehold ownership is the norm rather than the exception — a For Sale board here usually means a house you actually own outright, not a leasehold flat with a service charge attached.
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Areas ranked overall
Areas are laid out roughly as they sit in Leicester, north at the top. Scores are out of 100; 60 is typical for the country.
Stoneygate
68Ranked 1 of 56 by overall. Strongest on safety (80), weakest on property market (45).
Is Leicester a good place to live?
Leicester scores 52/100 overall, which the scorecard rates as fair — 60 is typical for the country.
It stands out for environment (70).
Scores come from official data on safety, schools, transport, prices, health, food & drink and the local environment, for Leicester in East Midlands, each measured against the national average.
Summary of Leicester
Terraced streets dominate here — red-brick rows running off the main roads, split between owner-occupiers who've stayed put for decades and a steady churn of renters and students drawn in by De Montfort University. It's a young city by feel as much as by number: a median age in the early thirties, dense terraces packed at over 5,000 people per square kilometre, and a population that keeps the corner shops and takeaways busier than the wine bars. This isn't a place that performs for visitors; it just gets on with itself.
The practical picture is workable rather than glamorous. Leicester Rail Station puts you on a direct line into the national network, and with over 1,500 local stops and two rail stations serving the city, getting around without a car is realistic. Schools are more mixed than the city's overall grade suggests — the average Ofsted rating sits right on the national norm, and while Sparkenhoe Community Primary carries a Good rating, the standout Outstanding options (Catherine Infant School, Castle Mead Academy) are the ones worth checking your specific street against, since quality varies block by block. Housing is where Leicester quietly outperforms its reputation: a median price around £235,000 is well under the national average and roughly in line with the regional one, terraced houses lead the market, and freehold ownership is the norm rather than the exception — a For Sale board here usually means a house you actually own outright, not a leasehold flat with a service charge attached.
Green space is genuinely abundant — nearly 600 parks and open spaces spread across the city, more hectares per resident than the national average — which does a lot of quiet work in a place this densely built. Weekends lean on that: a walk in one of the larger parks, a curry on the Golden Mile, then back to a terrace street that could be in any one of a dozen neighbourhoods. Healthcare and connectivity both score comfortably above the national bar, and full-fibre broadband reaching 94% of the city means working from a back bedroom is no hardship. The one figure that doesn't fit the general B-grade steadiness is crime: violence and sexual offences make up over a third of all recorded crime, and the total volume is high for a city this size, even though the rate is slightly better than Leicester's own historic average and the safety trend reads flat rather than worsening. It's not a statistic to ignore, but it sits alongside genuinely improving house prices and solid infrastructure rather than defining the place outright.