Nottingham

Terraced Victorian streets ripple out from the centre in tight rows, punctuated by student lets, corner shops, and the odd converted academy building — this is a city that reads as young, dense, and still working out what it wants to be. The median age here is 31.3, a good decade below the national figure, and the population density, at 4,332 people per square kilometre, is well over the national average. You feel that density on the pavements more than in any particular skyline.

The practical picture is dominated by the tram rather than the train — NTU, High School, Royal Centre and Gregory Street tram stops all thread through the city, giving you a transport network built for short, frequent hops rather than long commutes, which suits a population that skews towards renters and students. Schools are more mixed: the average Ofsted rating sits almost exactly on the national norm, and Nottingham Girls' Academy stands out as the nearest outstanding secondary, but the borough-wide Progress 8 score of -0.21 tells you attainment doesn't always match the outstanding tag, and Bluecoat Bentinck's "requires improvement" rating sitting among otherwise "Good" primaries is the kind of unevenness you'd want to check street by street. Housing itself is unusually affordable for a city this size — a median price of £191,000 against a national figure of £281,000 puts Nottingham firmly among the cheaper major cities, and against its own parent benchmark it's still running about 4% below. Terraced freehold houses dominate sales, nearly 1,500 of the 1,714 recorded sales were freehold, which tells you a for-sale board here is far more likely to mean a two-up two-down with a small yard than a leasehold flat share.