Britain’s ‘cheapest’ town with homes on sale for as little as £80k

The small industrial town of Cumnock has made headlines in the past for its competitively priced housing market, and new analysis from Zoopla has confirmed its status as Britain’s most affordable town.

Property prices in the Victorian-looking hamlet, which actually dates to the 19th century, averaged £80,300 in the last 12 months, compared to an eye-watering £307,600 in Britain as a whole.

The average sale price in Cumnock clocked in at 1.1 times typical household earnings in the area, while the country-wide total was roughly 3.8 times the average income for a two-person home.

And there must be something in the local water because Ayrshire, on the shores of the Firth of Clyde in southwest Scotland, is also home to three more of Britain’s cheapest towns for house buyers this year – Girvan, Saltcoats and Ardrossan.

Cumnock is best known as a former coal mining town and for its links to Scottish Labour Party founder James Keir Hardie, who has a bust outside the 19th century town hall, and the poet Robert Burns, who visited it several times.

The industrial cluster of buildings dating from the 1800s is spread around the honey-coloured Cumnock Old Church and 14th century Mercat Cross, erected under King James IV alongside the right to hold a market in the square.

And while the mining industry began to nosedive in the 1960s, remnants of the town’s once-defining trade remain in the surviving Baroney A-Frame, now a memorial and picnic area.

The Baird Institute, a free museum in central Cumnock, also offers insight into its pottery trade, which took off after the discovery of a rare mineral graphite in the pre-industrial years, and the creation of intricate plane-tree snuff boxes that put it on the map in the early 1800s.

If all that history and the cheapest house prices in the country weren’t enough to win you over, the Scottish town is also less than six miles from stately homes Dumfries House, Glaisnock House and Auchinleck House.

It also has easy access to Glasgow, Ayr and Kilmarnock and is just a 10 minute drive from Ballochmyle Country Park – praised by visitors on TripAdvisor for its “stunning and impressive landscapes” and routes winding around an abandoned castle to the shores of Loch Lomond.