Sheffield.
So much to answer for.
Pulp, Richard Hawley, Meadowhall, Henderson's Relish, The Human League, steel, and the beautiful Peak District.
Greenest city in England - we have more parkland per person than anywhere. Fourth city in England. Overlooked by the brasher cities of the North, for whom it isn't big and bold enough, and the South, who think it's all t'mills and t'whippets and t'flatcaps.
Only connection with Manchester and the motorway network of NW is a winding, perilous road which closes at the first hint of a flake of snow and which still sports a sign saying BEWARE OF HORSES.
Run by a staggeringly slipshod council whose idea of competence is to close a successful school and force people to go to one on the other side of the valley, and whose vision of the future is an ugly "prestige" shopping-mall plonked in the city centre in a vain attempt to try and be like Leeds. Even though there is bugger-all chance of us getting any designer shops. Not that we need them.
Fantastic arts and concert venues, possibly the best outside London - the City Hall, the Millennium Galleries, the Arena, the Don Valley Stadium, the Graves Art Gallery, the Cultural Quarter. 7% of the city's poulation work in creative industries - twice the national average. Great sporting facilities, too.
A friendly and slow-paced "feel", more like a collection of villages than a big city - the rhythm of the place is not like Leeds or Manchester at all.
House prices? Well, depends where you go. A 3-bed terrace with a nice garden will set you back under £100K in a part of the city where kind drug-dealers offer free samples on the street corners and the highest qualification your child will get on leaving school is an ASBO. On the other hand, rthe same house is more like £250K+ (and the asking price is the STARTING price) in a leafy suburb where your offspring will mix with children called Tilly and Gabriel and won't get his head stuffed down the toilet for playing the violin, and where you hear more people saying Claaas than Classe.
And I wasn't even born here! I'm a soft southern jessie gone native.