People who move to Sheffield from other cities tend to have a similar experience: they arrive expecting a smaller, cheaper, grimmer version of Leeds or Manchester, and they find instead that the city has a quality of life that neither of those cities can quite match – at a price that makes the comparison slightly embarrassing for the places with better PR.

The rents are genuinely low. A decent two-bedroom house in Crookes, Walkley, or Meersbrook – all good areas with strong pub culture and access to the city – rents at £800-1,000 per month at current market rates. The equivalent in Manchester’s inner south (Chorlton, Didsbury, Levenshulme) is £1,100-1,400. The equivalent in Leeds’s equivalent suburbs is similar. Sheffield is the cheapest major northern city by a measurable margin, and the gap hasn’t closed despite years of housing market pressure because Sheffield’s supply of Victorian terraced housing stock is large relative to the demand.

The hills are real and you should know about them in advance. Sheffield is built on seven hills in the way that the cliche says Rome is, except Sheffield’s hills are steeper and more numerous and the Romans didn’t have to cycle up Crookes to get home. People who move here from flat cities experience a period of adjustment, during which they develop a relationship with gradient that eventually becomes a source of mild pride. Sheffield people are fit in the particular way of people who walk up hills regularly without intending to exercise.

The tram network – the Supertram – is old, occasionally delayed, and connects the city’s major corridors reliably enough to constitute working public transport. The city centre is small and walkable. The trains to Leeds (fifty minutes), Manchester (an hour), and London (two hours fifteen on the fast service) make Sheffield viable as a base for people whose professional lives extend beyond the city.

The job market is real but smaller than Manchester or Leeds. Sheffield’s economy centres on healthcare (two major hospitals, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the largest in the country), higher education (two universities with 60,000 students between them), and a surviving but leaner manufacturing sector. The creative industries quarter has generated digital and media employment. For people whose work is remote or transportable, Sheffield’s quality-of-life advantage is obvious. For people needing a specific professional ecosystem, the calculation is more complicated.

The city’s personality is the thing that holds people once they’ve arrived. Sheffield is unpretentious in a way that can initially read as unfriendly to people from more performatively sociable cities, and then becomes one of the things they value most. The city doesn’t need to impress anyone. It doesn’t try to. What you get is what’s actually there, which turns out to be substantial.