Huntingdon and St Neots have come out near the bottom of a survey highlighting the best places to live for commuters travelling to London.

High season ticket prices and a relatively low life satisfaction rating put St Neots in 71st spot and Huntingdon 85th out of 116 commuter towns ranked by credit data firm TotallyMoney.

Nearby Cambridge came in at 111th, Northampton 112th, Peterborough 113th, and Bedford 114yj, with highly desirable Virginia Water - where average house prices come close to £1.5 million - coming bottom.

A spokesman for TotallyMoney explained why Huntingdon and St Neots had fared so badly: “The season tickets are some of the most expensive we looked at, both over £5,000. St Neots has the 94th most expensive ticket and Huntingdon the 102nd. This is in contrast to the likes of Benstead, £1,916, and Waltham Cross, £1,968, which have the two cheapest tickets.

“Journey times are also longer at 40 minutes, St Neots, and 48 minutes, Huntingdon, whereas the 10 quickest journey times were all sub-25 minutes.”

The spokesman said: “Although the average house prices are in the top 20 in terms of affordability, Huntingdon £280,000 and St Neots £288,000, the above points, compared with an ONS Life Satisfaction rating of 7.63 - in the bottom 30 - led to the final rankings being 71st, St Neots, and 85th, Huntingdon.”

Purfleet in Essex came top of the list with a journey time to London of 33 minutes, season ticket price of £2,376 and an average house price of just under £211,000, combined with a life satisfaction rating of 7.77.

Five Essex towns were in the top 20 and Hertfordshire also did well. The nearest highly-rated town was Biggleswade, just two stops south of St Neots, which came 16th.

TotallyMoney compared average house prices, length of commute time, the cost of an annual season ticket and life satisfaction score to draw up its list of commuting hotspots.

Although Virginia Water scored well for life satisfaction, its high property prices made it out of reach for most commuters, putting it at the bottom of the table, with Oxford second worst because of high property prices, the commute of nearly an hour and season tickets costing nearly £6,000.

Commuters can work out the best town for them at https://www.totallymoney.com/commuter-hotspots.