Manchester
Use the search above, tap the map, or click any row in the table. The card updates and you can copy a link straight to it.
All 60 university towns
New STI diagnoses per 100,000 people living in each town in 2025. The arrows show how far each one moved since 2024. Click a heading to sort, or a row to select.
| Rank | Town | Universities | New STIs /100k | vs England | vs 2024 | Gonorrhoea | Syphilis | Students |
|---|
Manchester overtook Brighton this year. Its rate went up 2.5% while England's fell 6.8%, and its gonorrhoea rate is the highest of any district outside London. Salford, next door, is third and still climbing (up 9.0%). Brighton slipped to second and is at least heading the right way, down 6.7%, though it still has the highest syphilis rate of any university town at 41.2 per 100,000, about three times the national figure.
Lincoln at fourth surprised us. Part of the answer is testing. Lincoln finds more chlamydia in young women than anywhere else in England outside London, and towns that test more find more.
The big movers: Exeter jumped 16 places and Birmingham 10 (its rate rose 24.8%, the biggest rise of any city on the list). Cambridge dropped 12 places and Middlesbrough 14.
London, on its own terms
London isn't in the main table. Its boroughs run at rates that have little to do with students, and most of its universities can't be pinned to one borough. So here are its 15 university boroughs, ranked against each other.
London overall, new STIs per 100,000 people in 2025. That's 2.4 times the England figure, and down 9.8% on 2024.
University boroughs above Manchester, the highest town in the main table.
Students as a share of London's adults. Manchester's figure is 17.5%.
| Rank | Borough | Universities | New STIs /100k | vs England | vs 2024 | Students |
|---|
Click a row to open its card. Rates per 100,000 residents of all ages, 2025. Each borough is where a university's main campus sits. London students live all over the city.
Southwark tops the London list at 2,204 per 100,000, 5.0 times the England figure. 9 of the 15 boroughs are above Manchester.
But this isn't a student story. Put the boroughs into the main table and the link between student numbers and STI rates all but disappears: the correlation drops from 0.50 to 0.17. Wandsworth is 7.7% students and runs at 1,383. The two highest-rate boroughs in the whole city, Lambeth (2,445) and Hackney (2,113), don't have a university main campus at all.
And the boroughs don't line up with the universities. King's College London alone has campuses in Westminster, Southwark and Lambeth, where the rates are 1,842, 2,204 and 2,445. Pick a different building and a university's "rate" moves by 600 points. That's why London sits here, ranked against itself, and not in the main list.
Compare any two
We've started you off with the obvious pair.
Oxford's rate (674 per 100,000, 5th in the table) is 66% higher than Cambridge's (406, 22nd), and the gap widened last year: Oxford went up 11.8%, Cambridge fell 23.6%. It's part of a pattern. Towns with a Russell Group university average 473 per 100,000 against 359 for the rest, 32% higher.
Is it the students?
Each dot is a town. Further right means more students; higher up means more STIs. Your selected town is marked.
Mostly, yes. Across every district in England outside London, places with more students have more STIs, and the link is strong for this kind of data. Within our 60 towns, each extra percentage point of students adds about 17 per 100,000 on the trend line.
But it isn't a rule. Loughborough is nearly one-seventh students and still has the lowest rate of any big student town, 199 per 100,000. Oxford has the most student-heavy population in the country and sits 5th, not first. The lowest rates of all belong to the rural campuses, like Cirencester and Hartpury, where the district is far bigger than the university. And some of what you're seeing is testing: the towns that look worst are often the ones checking hardest.
Three more measures, and the movers
Same year, same towns. On chlamydia, a high number is good news: it means lots of young women are getting tested. Click a name to open its card.
Gonorrhoea
Syphilis
Chlamydia testing
Biggest rises since 2024
Biggest falls since 2024
These are rates for whole towns, everyone who lives there, not just students. And the country is heading the right way: England's rate fell 6.8% in 2025 and is down a quarter since 2019. UKHSA counted 334,151 new STIs of all kinds last year, 8.3% fewer than the year before.
If Freshers' Week hands you one useful thing, make it a test. Sexual Health Week (14 to 20 September) and Freshers' fairs land in the same fortnight for a reason. NHS testing is free and confidential, usually by post, and most STIs are simple to treat. Start at nhs.uk/sexual-health-services.
The method, in plain English
We took every university in England with a main campus (93 of them), found the local council area the campus sits in, and looked up that area's official 2025 STI rate in UKHSA's Fingertips data. That gave us 60 areas. The rate is new STI diagnoses per 100,000 residents, not counting chlamydia in under-25s, which is the standard headline measure. It counted 258,649 diagnoses in England in 2025; the total including everything was 334,151. Student numbers come from the 2021 Census.
Two honest limits. A town's rate covers everyone who lives there, not just students. And places that test more find more, so a high rate is partly a sign of good sexual-health services.
More detail
- London is ranked on its own, in the London panel. Its universities can't be matched cleanly to boroughs (King's College London alone spans three), and its rates sit far above the rest of the country (1,050 per 100,000 across the capital; Lambeth alone is 2,445) for reasons that have little to do with students. Any "rest of England" comparison here leaves London out of both sides.
- Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their sexual-health data separately, on different definitions, so this covers England only.
- 7 universities sit in large rural districts (Falmouth, Cumbria, Buckingham and Bucks New, Harper Adams, the Royal Agricultural University, Hartpury and Cranfield). We include them, flagged, because the district is far bigger than the campus. Where a campus straddles a boundary we use the district it's named for.
- Rates are for all ages, so young towns naturally sit higher. Geography is lower-tier local authorities on April 2023 boundaries. The Russell Group figure is a simple average of the 15 towns with a Russell Group campus against the other 45. Movement arrows compare the same 60 towns' 2024 and 2025 rates.
- Checked on 20 September 2026 against UKHSA's 2025 annual STI report (published 2 June 2026). The national gonorrhoea and syphilis changes match exactly.
- Sources: OHID Fingertips, Sexual and Reproductive Health Profiles; UKHSA STI annual data 2025; ONS Census 2021; ONS boundaries. Open Government Licence v3.0; census data Crown copyright.
Press kit
Everything here is free to publish with a credit to Erobella and, online, a link to this page. Link to any university's card with the copy-link button. Quotes in the release are from Brenda Jensen, Head of Data & Research at Erobella.
Press enquiries: Dara Weston, PR Manager, dara@erobella.com.