By Tony Booth

A new report by the urban policy research unit, The Centre for Cities, has discovered that despite massive regeneration projects in major centres such as Manchester and Liverpool, it is actually smaller cities and towns like Aldershot and Reading that seem to be performing the best.

The Centre for Cities was set up in 2005 as a registered charity with the prime objective to understand how and why economic growth and change takes place in Britain's cities ... and help individual cities improve their own economic performance.

The core funder is The Gatsby Foundation, one of the Sainsbury family charitable trusts; and the chairman is no less than Tom Bloxham MBE, the chairman and founder of imaginative developer and housing provider Urban Splash.

The charity has already created a strong track record of research on the economic performance of UK cities and, last year, it looked at city-centre housing and business investment in deprived areas.