Best & Worst Places To Live Edinburgh: The Best Place To Live

Date Published:

03/06/2008

Storming into the top spot in the 4Homes chart, Scotland's capital and second largest city is probably best known for the annual Edinburgh Festival, when roughly half a million tourists flock to the city to see world-class theatre, comedy, films and music. But what's it like to live there full-time?

Delighted or Disgusted? Discuss with others and rate the area >>

Phil And Kirstie's View

This years very best place to live winner is Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city. It's the flower of Scotland - and the rest of the UK now! So swing your chariots in this direction! Edinburgh tops our countdown and ranks highly in ALL our 6 categories. What makes it even more a winner is that the typical house goes for just £205,000! That's £5,000 below the UK average.

It also has amazing lifestyle on offer, with far and away the highest number of shops, bars and restaurants in our top ten, and for culture vultures there are more museums and galleries here than any other Local Authority.

And the biggest plus for living here? Well you'd be a resident of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Edinburgh's got the highest concentration of listed buildings in the UK. How appropriate then, that it should be top of our list of the Best & Worst Places to Live in the UK 2007!

Edinburgh's beloved Old Town, with its medieval road plan and Reformation era buildings, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But a £20 million regeneration programme announced in June 2007 will see a series of rundown buildings between the Royal Mile and Market Street transformed into a brand new quarter, set to include 80 flats and a budget hotel. Locals aren't pleased, but if you're planning to move, you could snap up some brand new housing in the picturesque heart of the city.

Also a World Heritage Site, the New Town, built from 1765 onwards, and originally designed to be purely residential, followed a grid-like street layout like modern day New York when first built, much of which you'll still find intact today. These days, the New Town is known for its shops - the famous Princes Street being retail Mecca for visitors and locals alike.

The South side, Edinburgh's less famous and primarily residential district, can nevertheless boast famous residents: if you like the sound of having authors J. K. Rowling, Ian Rankin, and Alexander McCall Smith for neighbours, this is the place to be. To the east, the port of Leith was controversially merged with Edinburgh in 1920 and has enjoyed a growing profile since the 1980s as an excellent environment for white-collar workers.

A prosperous city, just over half of Edinburgh's residents work in professional occupations or as senior management, with just 1.9 per cent of the town's population claiming job seekers allowance. This is reflected in higher property prices than the national average. In fact, prices there have climbed steadily for the last five years, with the average Edinburgh home now over the £200,000 price barrier.

Think that's too expensive? It's still half the cost of a home in London, so if it's capital city living for you, this is certainly one you can afford to buy in. And for that alone, Edinburgh deserves its place as the pick of the crop.

<< Go back to view those that almost won, as well as the bottom 20 places

Discuss this remarkable result with people from across the UK >>

Discover the Worst Places to Live list, starting with number 20 >>

Local area information on Edinburgh from upmystreet.com >>

Edinburgh City Council >>

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