The best place to live in the UK

The annual Sunday Times report on the best places to live in the UK was featured in this weekend's Sunday Times newspaper.

York has been named as the best place to live in the UK for this year.
My parents, brother and sister all live in York- I'm the only one living 'down South'.
A useful exercise for students would be to use data from maps such as Datashine, Illustreets and similar tools to investigate the differences in quality of life around the country.
And where would be the 'worst places to live'?

Image: Alan Parkinson, York Minster detail

Give peace a chance

Interesting story on the most 'peaceful' places in Britain in the news today.

The United Kingdom Peace Index (UKPI) was released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, and it turns out that Broadland, which borders the region I live in in Norfolk to the east  is the most peaceful place in the UK.

You can download the whole report from their website, and do your own analysis.

Here's a video from the same site which provides a little more information too.

Image: Potter Heigham sign, Alan Parkinson, CC licensed

Expatistan - how expensive is your city ?

An interesting site - thanks to @urbanphotoblog for the tipoff...

Expatistan.
It's designed for those who are thinking of moving to another location. It allows you to compare the location of two cities in terms of the cost of living there in a number of categories.
There are almost 1500 cities in the database.

Would be a good activity to explore how the cost of living varies between a number of cities, and also to explore the accuracy of the information on which it is based...

For example, two of my best friends moved to Wellington in New Zealand several years ago, and have a great quality of life...  How does that compare in price with Norwich in the UK.
Is it cheaper or more expensive ?

Wolves

Image from Flickr under Creative Commons by David H-W (Extrajection)

More statistics on places, and quality of life...

The 5th WORST CITY on the planet is apparently WOLVERHAMPTON, according to this Daily Mail article.

I've only been there once: to see Sigur Ros play at the Civic Hall and it looked OK to me...

Update: Saturday 2nd January's Times magazine has a feature from Powys, on being named the "happiest place in Britain" and the issues with using statistics to identify places in this way. Some interesting quotes from the RGS and Sheffield University on the wording of the original reports that were used to identify headlines such as the one above...