The Best And Worst Places In The UK To Get A Job

When you’re wrapped up in a southern city-dwelling bubble of creative jobs and tricky internships where you’re constantly asked to work for free for ‘exposure’, you can lose your grip on what unemployment in the UK really looks like and where the battles lie.

That’s why this list of the places in the UK where it’s hardest to find a job, compiled by Adzuna, a site for job adverts, is totally important. Because no, London isn’t the hardest place to get a job, by far.

The worst places in the UK to get a job

Of all of these, Swansea is the most southern point, and if you’ll note, seven of them are further north than Manchester. And how many of them are old mining towns? All apart from Belfast.

You might ask what mines have to do with low employment, and basically, well, these towns were set up for hundreds of years to dig for useful substances like coal. But in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher decommissioned the mines, meaning that we now import loads of our precious minerals. And the people who used to mine, the people who would then work in industries supporting miners and their families, all fell out of work.

The best places in the UK to get a job

The most northern one, apart from Manchester, is Cambridge. Manchester might be the 8th easiest place in the UK to get a job, but it’s only a 14-minute drive from Salford, the 10th hardest place in the UK to get a job.

And what’s the thing all the above cities have in common? Universities – Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Bristol, and Manchester all have pretty well-esteemed ones – and relative wealth: Milton Keynes, Reading, Winchester and Chelmsford are all doing pretty OK for themselves, money wise. Oh, and they’re all really well connected to London, so there are plenty of jobs for people in service industries for commuters and their families.

All in all, it’s pretty depressing news for places – and people – who are in desperate need of regeneration. But it’s worth remembering next time that old discussion of the jobs market comes up, that London isn’t on either list here.

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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson

Picture: Ada Hamza

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.