If you're looking to buy a house this year - this might be some welcoming news.
The Co-operative Bank has revealed the most affordable places to buy a house in the UK and three major Yorkshire cities have made it to the top six.
Both Sheffield and Leeds have average house prices lower than the national average (which is now £264,400 as of December 2023, according to Zoopla), and were thought to be the fifth and sixth best cities for first time buyers.
To find out the best cities for first time buyers, The Co-operative Bank made a list of the 30 most populated cities in the UK. Each city was then scored and ranked according to a range of metrics, including:
Average house price
Average conveyancing costs
Average surveying costs
Average stamp duty costs
Crime safety index score
Traffic index score
Life satisfaction score
This found that both Sheffield and Leeds had a similar crime safety index score of around 43, placing them between Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent, but when it came to traffic, Leeds was 32 points higher than its South Yorkshire comparison.
House prices differ slightly: £222,570 is the average in Sheffield and £246,026 in Leeds, and both placed a life satisfaction score of 7.3-7.5/10.
Leeds is ranked the sixth best city. / Images: Unsplash
Sheffield is ranked the fifth top place for first time buyers.
London is unsurprisingly the most expensive city for first time buyers in the UK, with the total average spend adding up to a huge £547,560. Bristol is the second-most expensive city (£353,033), followed by Edinburgh (£346,293), Reading (£332,283) and Southend-on-Sea (£327,729).
At the other end of the scale, another Yorkshire city can be found when solely comparing house prices. Kingston upon Hull was found to be the second-most affordable spot, offering a total cost of £140,814 around £5,000 less than, Blackpool with a total average price of £135,995 (including additional costs like conveyancing).
The tiramisu hype lives on, and this time it's coming to Leeds.
It really does feel like the traditional Italian dessert has taken the world by storm as of late.
Everything from tiramisu cups and tiramisu coffees have been popping up all over our feed, and now tiramisu in drawer form is popping up in the city centre.
Misu Tiramisu is an independent business that began at Manchester's Christmas Markets and quickly became one of the most popular operators, all thanks to its miniature tiramisu ‘drawers’.
Images: The Hoot Leeds
The individually portioned and colourfully packaged desserts quickly became one of town’s top puddings, and owners Aleem and Aishah went on to launch a stand inside the Manchester Arndale too.
And now they’re branching out again in Leeds inside Trinity shopping centre for a two month residency.
You’ll find all their delicious flavours of handmade tiramisu, including classic, pistachio, chocolate, Biscoff, mango, and lemon - they'll also have some gluten-free tiramisu on offer as well, so no one has to miss out.
Images: The Hoot Leeds
Misu Tiramisu owners Aleem and Aishah spent a year refining the recipe for their tiramisus after a trip to Milan, first launching with their first market stall in Sale.
Misu Tiramisu is now open inside Trinity shopping centre opposite Boots Opticians and Pop Specs.
They're open every day of the week for you to get your tiramisu fix, from 9am to 8pm Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 5pm on a Sunday.
And trust us Leeds, they're just as delicious as they are adorable.
Fossilised 320-million-year-old fish found in Leeds’ Roundhay Park
Clementine Hall
A prehistoric fish fossil has been unearthed at Roundhay Park in Leeds.
The fascinating prehistoric skull bone of a coelacanth fish was discovered by a geologist at Roundhay Park earlier this year.
It is thought the creature was frozen in time aeons ago, during an era when the park was submerged under a vast tropical lagoon.
The remarkable discovery has now been kindly donated to Leeds Museums and Galleries and added to the natural sciences collection at Leeds Discovery Centre.
Image: Leeds City Council
The Leeds fossil was found by Ru Smith of the Yorkshire Geological Society during a reconnaissance walk he was carrying out ahead of a planned field excursion in the north Leeds park.
Describing the moment he made the discovery, Ru said: “There’s a layer of rock in the park which dates from around 320 million years ago, from a time before the breakup of the continents, when what is now the park would have been situated close the Equator and under the warm waters of a tropical lagoon. West Central Africa would be a good place to find similar environments in the present.
“There’s a bed of freshwater mussels called Carbonicola at one level in the rock, and opening a piece of shale from this bed in my hands I saw something unusual – a distinctive skull bone of a large fish. I knew straight away this was something different and very rare."
The bone was verified byexperts as belonging to a coelacanth older than those found elsewhere in Yorkshire, making it the oldest fossil coelacanth discovered in the region.
Ru added: “Coelacanths are pretty amazing fish and it’s just very cool to think that at one time, you could have been standing in Leeds and watching them swim around above a bed of mussels in Roundhay Park.
“That’s really the wonder of geology, looking at the rock and time travelling in the imagination to what was a very different world.”
Sophie Smith -
27th February 2024 
