Revealed: the cities with the largest price rises over the past 10 years

Lloyds Bank has revealed a league table of the cities which have seen the highest price growth over the past decade - and top of the heap is Cambridge.

Cambridge has recorded the biggest price rise of any UK city over the past decade with a gain of 47 per cent from £288,403 in 2007 to £422,589 at the end of 2017 - that’s compared to the average UK city price rise of 12 per cent in the same period.  

St Albans is second with a rise of 44 per cent followed by Brighton & Hove on 39 per cent, Greater London on 31 per cent, followed by Cardiff and Canterbury both at 29 per cent. 

Nine of the ten top performers since 2007 are in southern England with the exception being Cardiff in Wales - also on 29 per cent.

Over a shorter period of time - just five years - Lloyds says Greater London has performed best with a rise of 61 per cent from £298,940 in 2012 to £480,800 in 2017. That’s followed by Coventry, Cambridge, Ely and Lisburn in Northern Ireland.

However, with high prices come affordability issues and Lloyds says affordability in cities has worsened with the ratio between house prices and average annual earnings increasing from 5.6 in 2012 to 7.0 in 2017.

The least affordable city is Oxford, where average house prices of £429,775 are 11.5 times the annual average earnings. 

Truro and Exeter are new entrants into the 10 least affordable cities list, both with an affordability ratio of 9.3 with house prices of £259,705 and £274,093 respectively. 

Leicester (8.1 times) and York (8.0) are the only cities outside southern England appearing in the top 20 least affordable UK cities.

There are six cities with average house prices that cost at least ten times average annual earnings.  

In addition to Oxford (11.5), these are Cambridge (10.5), Greater London, Brighton and Hove (both 10.2), Bath (10.1) and Winchester (10.0). 

Stirling in Scotland is the UK’s most affordable city for the fifth consecutive year. 

At £186,084, the average property price in the Scottish city is 4.0 times average gross annual earnings, although this figure has increased from 3.8 times in the last 12 months. 

Londonderry (4.1) in Northern Ireland remains the UK’s second most affordable city. Bradford (4.5) is named as the most affordable city in England and Swansea is the most affordable city in Wales (5.4).