They are not the most beautiful of spots, long practised in suffering the sneers of outsiders. But you’ll be slaving away so hard and happily that you’ll barely notice the aesthetic delights of Crawley’s County Mall shopping centre or Slough’s trading estate. Slough came surprise top of a survey last autumn by recruitment site Glassdoor, as the optimum place to work, based on wages, job satisfaction and vacancy numbers.
Crawley, meanwhile, has the UK’s highest rate of employment at 89.1%, according to Nomis at the Office for National Statistics. The town’s service economy is fed by the jets at Gatwick airport. Behind it are fellow south-east England beauty spots Dartford (87.6%), Basingstoke (87.2%) and Ashford (86.9%); and Orkney (87.4%), whose broad-based economy combines traditional agriculture, forestry and fishery with new arrivals such as office parks, oil and renewable energy jobs.
Just need work? There are most vacancies in Cambridge (20 jobs per jobseeker), says job ad search engine Adzuna, then Guildford and Swindon. The Centre for Cities found the highest wages in Reading, Aldershot, Basildon, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Milton Keynes and Edinburgh. Want to keep a job? Oxford, Cambridge and Reading, then, where jobs are least threatened from automation. Robots can’t afford the house prices.
