BOURNEMOUTH has been named as one of Britain's most thriving towns with good jobs, good incomes, lower deprivation and booming property prices - and it could be partly down to the success of The Cherries, one property expert has said.

Researchers looked at 438 settlements in England and Wales that are home to at least 20,000 people, to reveal where the most ‘booming’ towns are.

The research, conducted by property experts Savills considered the proportion of the population who are in work, suffer income deprivation, the numbers of jobs created over the past decade and the average income, using figures from the Office for National Statistics.

House price data from the Land Registry was used to calculate average values and test how resilient they were by seeing how they had fared since the EU referendum in June 2016.

Bournemouth is one of 22 towns named as the most thriving, which have all seen more than 10 per cent population and employment growth and have a job density of over 0.75 per cent.

It beat the Devon city of Exeter, Didcot, Wokingham, Bracknell, home to the Waitrose supermarket chain, Andover, Guildford and Watford. Bournemouth was beaten by seven towns including Colby in Cumbria, Colchester and Peterborough.

Bournemouth's population growth was 11.5 per cent from 2009 to 2017, while employment growth during the same period was 14.9 per cent. The average house price in the town was £283,229 in April 2019, which has increased by nearly 16 per cent since June 2016, and 35 per cent since 2009.

Local property expert Keith Fensom of Savills said: “It doesn’t surprise me that Bournemouth is thriving as it is such a wonderful part of the country to live, with miles of sandy beaches and our own micro-climate with more sunshine hours than most parts of the country.

"It is no longer considered as a town for people to retire to; ever since we have had a university young people have come here to study, fallen in love with the town and stayed here. Bournemouth having an established premier league football team has also helped place the town in the spotlight.”

Research conducted two years ago showed that house prices rose by 291 per cent in the 20 years to 2017 in Bournemouth. A year later researchers claimed that if the same average growth is seen in the next two decades as witnessed from 1997 to 2017, investors 'can expect an average 450 per cent increase in property prices for buildings near Premier League stadiums'.