Up-and-coming areas in Leeds: We speak to residents as new list reveals most improved suburbs in city

The area of Leeds where deprivation fell the most was Leeds city centre, where 62.1% of households were not deprived in 2021. This marked an improvement on 2011 when the figure was 36.2%.

One Leeds resident told the YEP: “I think the city centre is more up and coming because it seems to be the place to be at the minute. People are coming in to do their shopping and go to restaurants and things like that. Saturday is the most busy day,and I think once it gets warmer you’ll really start to see it getting packed out.”

Another said: “Leeds city centre is almost unrecognisable, and obviously Briggate used to have buses and there was no one way system. There was no students – they used to share houses in Hyde Park and Headingley, but the student population has grown and grown.”

Following closely behind was the Leeds Dock, Hunslet & Stourton area, where 54.9% of households were not deprived in 2021 – an improvement on 2011 when the figure was 31.2%. East End Park & Richmond Hill, Holbeck, Woodhouse & Little London and Beeston Hill & Hunslet Moor were next on the list.

A Hunslet resident said: “My husband lives around here and it’s good for the dog as we’ve just got a new dog, but there are some bits that are a little bit messy or horrible, but you’ve just got to get used to it and try and get on to the council about it. But there’s lots of different options for food around here and you’ve got the doctors close by.”

Across England and Wales as a whole, more than half of households (52%) were deprived in at least one of these four possible ways when the census took place in 2021 - that’s 12.8 million households. But this is a fall from the decade before, when the figure was 58%.

The census divides England and Wales into more than 7,000 smaller areas of between 5,000 and 15,000 residents, called middle-layer super output areas. For each of these areas, it publishes how many households were deprived in at least one of four measures.