Where Should You Live? (UK)

The best place for you to live is the one that matches the shape of the life you want: how big a place feels right, how close you want the sea, how near you want hills and open country, and how often you need to fly. This quiz turns those choices into a ranked shortlist of real UK towns and cities.

Most people choosing a place to live start from a name they already know. That is how you end up comparing two cities you have visited once and ignoring the market town an hour away that suits you better. Starting from what you want, rather than where you have heard of, opens the map up.

You tell us what matters and how much. We compare a hundred of the UK's larger towns and cities on the same facts, and hand you the five that fit best, with the reasons for each one written underneath. Each place also gets a match score, so you can see at a glance whether your top two are neck and neck or miles apart.

We use our own proprietary structure: every place is scored on four facts, each one weighted by how much you said it matters, and the closest overall fit rises to the top.

• Population size: you choose big city, small city, market town or village life. Places are compared on a sliding scale of size, so a place a little bigger or smaller than your ideal still scores well, and one far off scores lower.
• Distance to the coast: you say how near the sea you want to be. A high score pulls seaside towns and port cities up the list. A low score is happy for you to be well inland.
• Green space: you say how much you want hills on the doorstep. We measure each place's distance to the nearest national park, so a high score favours towns within easy reach of open country.
• Airports: you say how close you want a major airport. Frequent flyers get places with a big airport nearby. If you rarely fly, distance stops counting against anywhere.

For each of the four you also choose whether it "doesn't matter", "matters a little" or "matters a lot". A preference that matters a lot counts three times as much, so the ranking bends towards what you really care about.

The quiz asks fifteen short questions about the life you want. The core four (size, sea, hills and airport) drive the ranking, along with a region filter that lets you rule out any part of the UK in one tap: anywhere from the North East to Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales or London.

The rest build a fuller picture of how you live: your monthly housing budget, whether a quick train into a big city matters, how much nightlife and culture you want, how important schools are to you, whether you prefer young and buzzy or settled and calm, sunshine or mild and green, a fast-growing place or one that stays as it is, independent shops or big retail parks, car or car-free, and how often you work from home.

Those extra answers are saved with your result, so your profile is complete. The ranking itself stays focused on the four facts that we hold for every single place, which keeps every match fair and every reason on the card real.

Your result is five UK towns or cities, all five marked on a map, each with the population, coast distance and airport distance that drove the match. Here are the kinds of shortlist people see.

• Big-city life: choose big city, an airport close by and the coast as a low priority, and the UK's largest cities and conurbations lead the list.
• Seaside towns and port cities: score the sea high and coastal places rise fast, from resort towns to working ports and coastal cities.
• Hills on the doorstep: score green space high and you get towns and cities on the edge of national parks, the places where a Saturday walk starts from the bus stop.
• Smaller cities with good connections: pick small city and a nearby airport and you get compact cities with an easy route abroad.
• Market-town pace: choose market town or village life and the smaller places on the list come forward, often commuter towns and county towns.
• The surprise match: plenty of people find a town in their top five they had never thought of. That is often the most useful result of all.

Be honest about what you actually do, not what you would like to do. If you have flown twice in five years, an airport does not need to matter a lot, however much you love the idea of spontaneous city breaks.

Use "doesn't matter" freely. Switching off a preference is one of the quickest ways to open up the map, because it stops that fact pushing good places down the list.

Then rule out regions only if you really would not move there. Every region you remove makes the shortlist tighter, which is useful once you know what you want, and limiting if you are still exploring. Try it twice, once with no regions ruled out and once with your real constraints, and compare the two shortlists. The towns that appear in both are the ones to visit first, ideally on a normal weekday rather than a sunny bank holiday.