Doncaster named one of Yorkshire's most peaceful places to live by new study
The study ranked places across Yorkshire by peace and quiet
Doncaster has been named as one of the most peaceful places to live in Yorkshire by a new study.
The study, by property specialists SAM Conveyancing, scored every local authority in England and Wales on four measures that decide whether somewhere is genuinely peaceful to live in: how quiet it is at night, crime levels, how much public green space residents have, and how close homes are to nightlife venues such as pubs, bars and clubs.
Night-time noise was measured at 37.7 million individual addresses using Defra's national noise maps, so the score reflects what residents are exposed to at their own front doors.
North Yorkshire topped the region with a peace score of 58.6 out of 100, and has the lowest recorded crime rate in Yorkshire and the Humber at 47.4 offences per 1,000 residents, among the 35 lowest in England and Wales.
No authority in the region reaches the top 100 of the 316 local authorities ranked in England and Wales; North Yorkshire is the region's highest placed in 106th.
The study said Doncaster has the region's lowest exposure to nightlife, with only 1.41% of residents living beside a cluster of licensed premises.
Want more stories like this? Click here to get our daily newsletter
Bradford is the least peaceful place in the region, 15th of 15 and 288th nationally, with the least publicly accessible green space per resident in Yorkshire and the Humber.
Doncaster had a peace score of 53.7 out of 100.
Commenting on the study, Andrew Boast, CEO of SAM Conveyancing, said: "Buyers spend months on the things they can measure – the price, the survey, the school catchment – and almost no time on the thing they will notice on their first night in the house, which is how quiet it actually is.
“A Sunday afternoon viewing tells you very little about what a road sounds like at two in the morning, or what happens when the pub two streets away turns out.
"The encouraging thing is that this is all knowable before you commit.
“What the road carries at night, how close the nearest railway line is, what is licensed within a few hundred metres – that information is public, and it costs nothing to look at. Anyone moving home should be asking those questions before they exchange rather than after."