Unleashing the potential of the UK's cities: Core City profiles

This Core City profiles report extends the RSA’s UK Urban Futures Commission report, Unleashing the potential of the UK’s cities, released in September 2023.

As part of the UK Urban Futures Commission, we partnered with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth to explore how data available at the city level, including proprietary data such as that used in the Mastercard Inclusive Growth Score, can provide additional insights into the spatial strengths and potential of some of the UK’s Core Cities, across economic, social and natural systems capital.

This project's scope did not allow for harmonising the datasets of UK’s countries. Differences across these datasets mean we have focused only on the English and Welsh Core Cities. We aim to redress this limitation in future work.

The cities we focus on in this report are:

• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Cardiff
• Leeds
• Liverpool

• Manchester
• Newcastle
• Nottingham
• Sheffield

This report is published as a supplementary resource for those living, working and studying in these cities. For each city, we provide a quantification of its three capitals across various metrics, detailed below. In addition, we provide each city’s population density across its Lower layer Super Output Areas as well as how the city can be defined geographically.

Download the Unleashing the potential of the UK's cities: Core City profiles report (5.8MB).

Interested in helping fund our work?

Partnerships with local government, businesses, trusts and foundations are critical to funding and delivering projects like this. Find out about our work and how you can get involved as a funding or mission partner, or as a donor below.