Enterprise offered a strong alternative to the Leander path

Enterprise and the later Leanders occupied broadly comparable displacement bands, despite belonging to different stages of British cruiser development. Enterprise combined a 33-knot top speed with an 8,000-nautical-mile range at 15 knots, while the stated Leander figures are slightly slower and markedly shorter-ranged. The comparison shows that the E-class hull was more than an obsolete First World War leftover. Continued iteration could have given the Royal Navy a powerful long-range basis for its interwar light cruisers, even though later Town and Crown Colony ships followed a different procurement path.