The Most Romantic Places in Britain: Revealed

To mark the start of the winter season, the wellness team at UK Saunas has researched 38 top UK staycation spots, to work out which of the UK’s towns and cities offer the best experiences for couples looking to wrap up and spend some quality time together.

To do this, they gathered data across three ‘romance metrics’, to work out which places were the most and least romantic. 

The areas they researched were: 

• The number of restaurants where Google reviews mentioned the word “romantic”, per capita
• The number of hotels listed as “romantic” and “for couples” in TripAdvisor, and how much of the total hotel share these made up 
• The number of Instagram posts including #proposal in each location

Key Findings

1. Durham was the most romantic city in the UK; it has the highest share of romantic restaurants per person, and highest percentage of romantic and couple-friendly hotels. 
2. Other highly preserved cities, including York, Lancaster, Oxford, and Edinburgh also ranked highly.
3. The least romantic locations – of those analysed – were Sunderland, Bradford, Leicester, Kingston-upon-Hull and South Lanarkshire.
4. London, despite its reputation as a top European holiday spot for couples, did not make the top 10. 

The Most Romantic Places in Britain

The Most Romantic Places to have Dinner

The Most Popular Proposal Locations

 

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Methodology 

Starting our search – We began by compiling a list of the 38 largest towns and cities (by population) in the UK. 

When compiling our data for each of the metrics, we started with these cities. 

To find the number of romantic restaurants per person we used data from local Google restaurant reviews, we collated the total number of listed restaurants where the word “romantic” was mentioned for each location. We then divided this by the total population of each place, using recent ONS data, to find out the number of romantic restaurants per capita. 

To find the number of romantic hotels we searched TripAdvisor for hotels listed as ‘romantic’ and ‘for couples’. We then worked out the percentage share this figure made up of all listed hotels, by dividing that figure by the total number of hotel listings in each place. 

To find out which location has the highest number of proposals, we searched Instagram for any posts including the #proposal that have ever been made in each location. 

We used a scoring system, in which all 38 locations were ranked in descending order for each metric. These scores were added together to find the total scores for every location, and they were then ranked accordingly. 

You can view our full data-set here.