The best and worst places to live and make a living in the UK, revealed in one chart

Blackburn comes top, if you’re keen on buying a house and having plenty of cash to spare

The study only compared the cost of housing with the average wages – not whether those houses would actually be nice (Getty Images)

The best place to make a living in the UK is Blackburn, according to research by Statista.

Research comparing the average salary around the country with the average mortgage in the same place has found that Gloucester is the most expensive place to live, while Derby, Cambridge and Sunderland are far more comfortable.

The analysis doesn’t account for other parts of living in a place, like culture or transport links, which tend to favour bigger cities and places that are expensive. Instead, it looked purely at how easy it is to buy a house and still have cash to spare.

The chart also accounts for job growth and unemployment. In Cambridge, for instance, the average mortgage repayment is very high at £1,038 – but correspondingly high wages, alongside low unemployment and very fast job growth mean that it scored among the best places to live.

In Blackburn, the best place to make a living, the average mortgage repayment works out at 21 per cent of the average salary. In the worst place, Gloucester, the average mortgage represents 52 per cent of the median wage.

In the same rankings, London came at 26 – roughly halfway down the cities that were studied. Other cities that tend to be expensive because people live in them to commute into the capital, such as Brighton, also ranked low.