Every residential sale recorded in Leeds's LS1 postcode district in 2025 was a flat. Not almost every one — all 50 of them, according to HM Land Registry's price paid data. Travel to Middlesbrough's TS1, the postcode covering the town's own centre, and the picture reverses almost completely: only 5 of 122 sales were flats, with the rest houses, mostly terraces. A sweep of 7,665 full market-value sales across the literal "district 1" postcode of 29 major English and Welsh cities in 2025 shows just how differently their historic cores have filled in — and how little a single label like "city centre" tells you about what's actually for sale there.
The 29-city ranking
The table below covers every sale in each city's central postcode district in 2025, split by property type. "Houses" means detached, semi-detached or terraced; a small number of sales fall outside Land Registry's main type codes and aren't shown separately.
| Rank | City | Postcode district | 2025 sales | Flats | Houses | Flat share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leeds | LS1 | 50 | 50 | 0 | 100.0% |
| 2 | Birmingham | B1 | 179 | 177 | 2 | 98.9% |
| 3 | Newcastle | NE1 | 70 | 69 | 1 | 98.6% |
| 4 | Manchester | M1 | 181 | 178 | 2 | 98.3% |
| 5 | Liverpool | L1 | 216 | 212 | 2 | 98.1% |
| 6 | Bristol | BS1 | 207 | 196 | 9 | 94.7% |
| 7 | Leicester | LE1 | 56 | 51 | 5 | 91.1% |
| 8 | Nottingham | NG1 | 83 | 73 | 10 | 88.0% |
| 9 | Cardiff | CF10 | 222 | 194 | 28 | 87.4% |
| 10 | Sheffield | S1 | 72 | 61 | 4 | 84.7% |
| 11 | Bradford | BD1 | 51 | 40 | 8 | 78.4% |
| 12 | Plymouth | PL1 | 332 | 217 | 113 | 65.4% |
| 13 | York | YO1 | 98 | 64 | 34 | 65.3% |
| 14 | Hull | HU1 | 57 | 37 | 19 | 64.9% |
| 15 | Southampton | SO14 | 269 | 173 | 95 | 64.3% |
| 16 | Norwich | NR1 | 467 | 211 | 255 | 45.2% |
| 16 | Derby | DE1 | 166 | 75 | 91 | 45.2% |
| 18 | Reading | RG1 | 563 | 232 | 330 | 41.2% |
| 19 | Portsmouth | PO1 | 235 | 82 | 153 | 34.9% |
| 20 | Bath | BA1 | 696 | 240 | 450 | 34.5% |
| 21 | Oxford | OX1 | 184 | 56 | 128 | 30.4% |
| 22 | Coventry | CV1 | 138 | 41 | 97 | 29.7% |
| 23 | Wolverhampton | WV1 | 83 | 19 | 64 | 22.9% |
| 24 | Cambridge | CB1 | 587 | 128 | 456 | 21.8% |
| 25 | Swansea | SA1 | 524 | 100 | 424 | 19.1% |
| 26 | Exeter | EX4 | 641 | 103 | 534 | 16.1% |
| 27 | Preston | PR1 | 758 | 82 | 675 | 10.8% |
| 28 | Stoke-on-Trent | ST1 | 358 | 23 | 335 | 6.4% |
| 29 | Middlesbrough | TS1 | 122 | 5 | 116 | 4.1% |
Eleven of the 29 centres sold at least four flats for every house in 2025. Five — Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool — sold almost nothing else: a combined 696 flats against 7 houses across all five postcodes. At the other end, Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent and Preston sold mostly houses in their literal centre, with flats in single figures or low double figures.
Why some centres are flats-only and others aren't
Two things are happening at once, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is what a postcode district actually covers. In the five biggest flat-dominated centres, "district 1" is drawn tightly around the commercial, retail and office core — the kind of ground that, since the 1990s, has mostly been redeveloped as purpose-built apartment blocks or converted from offices and warehouses into flats under permitted development rights. There was very little surviving terraced housing stock inside that boundary to begin with, so the postcode's residential sales are almost entirely new or converted flats.
In cities further down the table, "district 1" is a bigger, older boundary that was drawn before large-scale city-centre apartment building took off, and it still takes in the Victorian or Edwardian terrace streets that originally housed the town's working population close to its mills, docks or railway. Middlesbrough's TS1, Stoke-on-Trent's ST1 and Preston's PR1 all fall into this group — the "centre" postcode here is a mixed commercial-and-terrace neighbourhood rather than a pure retail-and-apartments core.
The second factor is simply how much new-build flat development has landed in a particular postcode in the past two decades. Cardiff Bay-adjacent CF10, Southampton's SO14 and York's YO1 all sit in the middle of the table — enough apartment building to tip the balance away from the local terrace stock, but not so much that it has wiped the house market out entirely.
The exceptions are still a housing market, just a different one
It's worth being precise about what the bottom of the table does and doesn't show. Middlesbrough and Stoke-on-Trent having low flat shares doesn't mean their centres are short of homes for sale — TS1 recorded 122 sales in 2025 and ST1 recorded 358, both respectable volumes. It means the stock on offer there is overwhelmingly older terraced housing rather than apartments, which is a different buying proposition: different room layouts, different running costs, and — as the cheapest-terrace figures in the near-centre first-time-buyer threshold ranking show for several of the cities higher up this table — often a very different price band too.
Cambridge (21.8% flats) and Swansea (19.1%) are a useful reminder that a lower flat share doesn't always mean cheaper or older stock — both have plenty of modern flat development, just not concentrated inside the exact CB1 or SA1 boundary used here. A postcode district is a Royal Mail sorting boundary, not a planning designation, so its edges don't always match where a city's actual commercial core sits.
What this means if you're choosing between a flat and a house
If a flat in the thick of a city centre is what you're after, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool are where the market is overwhelmingly built around exactly that — Manchester's M1 postcode is a good place to see the current picture and run the true cost on a specific property. If you want a house but still want to be centrally located, the data points toward cities like Middlesbrough, Stoke-on-Trent, Preston, Exeter or Swansea, where the literal centre postcode still has a working terraced-house market rather than almost none at all. For a view of how cheap those central flats actually get across the whole set of cities, see the cheapest city-centre flats ranking; for how the two property types compare on energy efficiency once you're in a flat-heavy centre, the city-centre EPC comparison has the ratings breakdown.
Figures are based on 7,665 HM Land Registry full market-value sales across 29 city-centre postcode districts in England and Wales, completed in 2025 and fetched on 16 October 2026. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not covered by this dataset. More data-led comparisons like this one are on the Homecost market analysis section.