The terrace strikes back: how Doncaster became Britain’s fastest-growing market for first-time buyers

When Chloe Barnsley and her partner started looking for a house in 2024 they assumed, like most people in their late 20s earning ordinary salaries, that they would be renting into their 40s. Leeds, where they both worked, was out of the question. Sheffield, where Chloe grew up, had passed them by. Then a colleague mentioned Doncaster. “I actually laughed,” she said. “Then I looked on the portal and there was a two-bed terrace with a garden for £118,000 and I stopped laughing quite quickly.”

The couple completed on a house in Hyde Park, a grid of brick terraces 10 minutes’ walk from the station, in March. They were not alone. Doncaster recorded the highest proportion of first-time buyer purchases of any town or city in England in the year to September, according to analysis of mortgage lending data by a national building society, with 61% of all purchases going to people buying for the first time. Average prices for terraced homes rose 9.4% over the same period, the fastest in the country, to £128,500.

The reasons are not mysterious. Doncaster has a large stock of solid Victorian and Edwardian housing built for railway and colliery workers, much of it sold off cheaply over the decades to landlords and now coming back on to the market as buy-to-let margins have thinned. It has a mainline station with trains to London in 90 minutes and to Leeds in 30. And it has, until recently, been almost entirely ignored by the kind of buyer who has spent the past decade bidding up Hebden Bridge and Chapel Allerton.

“Two years ago I’d get first-time buyers from Doncaster. Now I get them from Leeds, Sheffield, York, and the odd one from London who has done the maths on the train,” said Darren Pickering, a branch manager at an independent agency in the town centre. “A terrace that was £95,000 in 2022 is £130,000 now. That still buys you a house with a garden, which in Leeds buys you a car park.”

The town’s civic leaders, long accustomed to being a punchline, are cautiously enjoying the attention. A long-delayed regeneration of the station quarter is finally under way, the Victorian corn exchange has reopened as a food hall, and a new city status, granted in 2022, has been used with some energy in marketing. But there are concerns. Rents in the terraced neighbourhoods have risen faster than prices, and local campaigners say long-term tenants are being displaced by sales to owner-occupiers.

“I’m glad people want to live here. I’d just like them to remember that people already did,” said Marlene Tasker, who chairs a residents’ association in Hexthorpe and has lived in the same terrace for 44 years. “Three families on this street have had to move out this year because the landlord sold. The new people are lovely. But it’s a change, and nobody asked us.”

Barnsley, for her part, has no regrets. “The street has a WhatsApp group, the neighbours brought us a cake, and there’s a bakery on the corner that does a steak bake I would fight you for,” she said. “I don’t think I’d have had that in a one-bed flat in Headingley for twice the money.”