There’s a lot to love about the UK. We’ve got some world class food – we especially excel at burgers, apparently – great universities, and the most gorgeous village in the world. But life is easier in some places than others, which is exactly what the Demos-PwC Good Growth for Cities Index sought to measure for 2025.
The study looked at the 50 biggest cities in the UK, judging them on 12 different categories such as availability of jobs, how skilled the working population is, and affordability of housing. An overall score for each place was calculated, allowing for easy comparison between towns. London wasn’t included, apparently because it’s more comparable to international hubs like Paris or New York than anywhere else here at home.
Walsall found itself at the bottom of the list, having struggled more than anywhere else for growth in the past year. It has the second least healthy high street, and third worst job market of anywhere. On top of that, average incomes are low and healthcare is apparently difficult to access. According to Demos and PwC, there wasn’t a metric by which Walsall had greatly improved over the past year.
Bradford and Birmingham came second and third last, respectively. There were a couple of positives for Bradford, which is among the five best places for work-life balance, but high crime rates and low average incomes dragged it down. Birmingham also did well in work-life balance, but struggled in pretty much every other category, coming dead last for jobs.
All of the bottom 10 ranking cities were in the north of England or Midlands, except for Southend in 5th and Swansea in 10th. Larger cities, including Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester, and Sheffield, underperformed across the board, creating issues for their suburbs too according to Andrew Carter, who works for the Centre for Cities. He explained to the Telegraph that ‘the poor performance of big cities minimises the economic opportunities available for smaller places nearby too.
‘That means lower wages and lower living standards, and goes some way to explaining the economic inequality between the greater South East and the Midlands and north of England’.
The worst cities in the UK for quality of life in 2025, according to the Good Growth for Cities Index
Here are the 10 cities which achieved the lowest grades in Demos-PwC’s study.
It’s worth noting that the Good Cities Index is purely based on a city’s economy, and does not consider cultural factors like food and nightlife which have a huge impact on quality of life. Basically, these towns aren’t necessarily bad places to live, but they have struggled with economic growth in the past year.
- Walsall
- Bradford
- Birmingham
- Middlesbrough and Stockton
- Southend
- Liverpool
- Manchester
- Sunderland
- Newcastle
- Swansea
On the flip side, York, Edinburgh, and Bristol topped the chart – you can read more about that here. You can also find the full study, completely with an interactive map, on PwC’s website here.
We went to Britain’s ‘most beautiful village in the world’ – here are 6 better places to go in the Cotswolds instead
Plus: This is the best university in the UK for 2026
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