Unusually, Cambridge students should be glad to hear that ‘the Other Place’ has been triumphant in a league table, as it has been revealed that Oxford is the UK’s biggest hotspot for bicycle thefts.

Using data from 92,508 incidents across England and Wales from May 2013 and April this year, the founder of the website Check That Bike, John Moss, has ranked British postcodes according to the number of reported bike thefts during that period.

The central Oxford postcode OX1 comes top of the list with 846 bikes reported stolen, whilst Cambridge CB1 comes second with 781. Third is the London postcode SE1, which includes boroughs such as Lambeth and Southwark, but both Cambridge and Oxford appear a second time in the top 10 list, with the CB2 and OX4 postcodes experiencing 564 and 572 thefts respectively.

The website Check That Bike was, according to Moss, founded with the intention of disrupting the process by which stolen bikes can be sold on. Bike owners are encouraged to register their bike’s frame number on the website, so that victims and potential buyers can cross-reference and identify whether a bike has been stolen.

Moss’s new ranking appears to be an improvement on the figures put forward by Cambridgeshire County Council’s Community Safety Partnership in January 2010. These findings dubbed Cambridge the UK’s “bike theft capital” after it was discovered that one bicycle is stolen in Cambridge every three-and-a-half hours.

In October last year, Cambridge police staged and filmed a series of bike thefts in the city centre, which revealed that citizens and students are turning a blind eye to the crime taking place on a daily basis.

In 2010, the Campaign for Better Transport named Cambridge the second-best city for cycling in Britain, having been beaten to the top spot by Nottingham.

Cycle lanes and bike storage facilities have made Cambridge one of the most cycle-friendly cities in the country, although these crime figures are likely to concern bike owners. Following the success of British cycling in the 2012 Olympics and the Tour de France, which passed through the city in July this year, Cambridge is home to greater numbers of cyclists than ever before.