The happiest place to live in Essex where rent is also the most affordable in the county

An Essex area called home by model Chloe Veitch and a star of the sitcom The Good Life has been labelled as the county's most affordable place to live. Tendring in Essex has previously been dubbed both the unhappiest place to live whilst simultaneously also being home to the happiest place to live.

The district is best known for its attraction-filled pier in Clacton and miles of shoreline. A survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that happiness in Tendring was well below the national average.

Meanwhile Clacton, which is part of Tendring, was named the happiest place to live by property experts RightMove. They asked 26,000 residents nationally how they feel about where they live and Clacton ranked top for Essex and third in the East of England.

READ MORE: Baby dies as man and woman arrested on suspicion of murder in Colchester

ALSO READ: The Essex city whose residents are among the smartest in the UK

The average rent in Tendring in 2015 was £639 per month but that figure now sat at £901 in the year to March 2024, according to the latest figures from the ONS. It means that rent accounts for 40.5 per cent of take home pay for residents in Tendring.

Clacton in Tendring was the birthplace for model Chloe Veitch. The 25-year-old went to Clacton Coastal Academy School before appearing on Netflix show Too Hot To Handle and Channel 4's Celebrity Hunted in 2022, finishing 3rd. Dame Penelope Keith, star of popular sitcom The Good Life, was born in Surrey but had her formative years in Clacton.

People in Great Britain spend more than half of their take-home pay on rent, as wages fail to keep up with soaring prices. It cost £1,246 a month on average to rent a home in Britain in the year to March 2024.

That’s up by 9.1% compared to the same time last year, and by 34.8% since March 2015, when the average home cost £924 a month to rent. Meanwhile, the average full-time employee earned an estimated £27,825 last year after tax and national insurance were deducted.

That’s up by 23.1% from 2014, when the average take-home pay was £22,597 for full-time workers. That’s almost 12 percentage points less than rents have increased by in that time.

It means that renting the average British home now costs 53.7% of the typical take-home pay, up from 49.1% back in 2015. The figures come from exclusive analysis of official earnings and rent price data by the Reach Data Unit.

Take-home pay has been calculated by deducting income tax and national insurance from the median salary in each local authority, for each year from 2014 to 2023.

Dan Wilson Craw, Deputy Chief Executive of Generation Rent, said: "Something has gone very wrong in this country when a home – one of the most basic things we need for a decent life – is becoming more expensive in relation to what we earn. Rent is our biggest cost and if living standards are going to improve it needs to come down.

"That means building more homes where people want to live, including social housing so that everyone can put a roof over their heads."