3rd year University of Leeds electrical engineering student here: run.
DO NOT and I repeat DO NOT come to the university of Leeds. All courses are over subscribed with under-qualified teaching staff. The university has completely failed to implement recovery measures after their disastrous handling of the pandemic and are still expecting the same results from students after huge cuts to contact hours which we still pay the same amount of tuition for.
The area is very unsafe to live in and has a plague of parasitic landlords, with thousands of students living in conditions akin to poverty despite being forced to spend ridiculous sums of money for what they are given.
Society funding has been cut so harshly, whilst staff receive pay rises for working at home, that many student-led societies no longer exist, including my own which I tried to hold together throughout the 2020/21 academic year with a large following. The university is intent on crushing the university's student union.
There are plenty of wonderful people at the university and it's area, and the surrounding area is beautiful and a joy to explore. But when you apply to university, you want to get a strong degree and leave with the academic knowledge you're paying for. You will not get that with the University of Leeds. Despite my course having a >99% pass rate, more than 15% of people dropped out over the pandemic owing to the impossible expectations of teaching staff. My grades took a huge hit, and I was even passed up on mitigating circumstances when I could'nt attend an online exam due to being in hospital owing to an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine.
One thing I've heard from many students is that very few of them are given an option to join the course they applied to, usually being shovelled onto a similar course with less funding and more postgraduate student teaching staff. This is not something you should settle for. You WILL NOT get the course that they are giving you, you will receive an amalgamation of teaching materials from the most available teaching staff within the school and be presented with a non-sensical degree which they will spend all of first year trying to convine is in fact a real discipline of study with loosely prepared teaching material which staff mostly haven't prepared themselves.
TL;DR - Don't be afraid to apply for universities with "lower" rankings on newspaper league tables. Search for student satisfaction, module content, qualifications of teaching staff, union representation and student-to-staff teaching ratios. I hope this has been useful.