Middlesbrough

Terraced streets dominate here, row after row of them, with the odd semi-detached pocket breaking things up near the parks. It's a working town in the proper sense — the kind of place where the housing stock was built for people who worked, not for people who wanted a view — and the streetscape still reads that way: solid, unfussy, a bit worn at the edges in places. It attracts people who need to be near family, near work, or near a cheap mortgage, rather than people chasing a lifestyle.

That affordability is the headline, and it's worth sitting with. A median house price around £134,000 is roughly half the North East average and a fraction of the national figure, which puts Middlesbrough among the cheapest places to buy in the country — the kind of gap that shapes everything else about who lives here. Semi-detached freehold homes are the norm, over ninety per cent of sales are freehold, and terraces sell for a third of their national equivalent, so a "For Sale" board here is usually advertising a starter home or a landlord's next buy rather than a forever house. Getting around is easier than the price tag might suggest: James Cook and Middlesbrough stations both run from the town, and with 846 local transport stops threaded through it, a car isn't essential the way it is in more spread-out places. Schools are more mixed — the average Ofsted rating sits right at the national norm, but secondary progress scores are well below it, and if you want a school with an Outstanding rating you're looking outside the town at Linthorpe Community Primary rather than in it.