Wellness is a multibillion dollar industry worldwide, with everybody from Gwyneth Paltrow to Lily Allen promoting the value of mental, physical and interpersonal wellbeing.

At UK Saunas, we are staunch advocates for all types of wellness so we’ve taken a deep dive into the data, examining thousands of listings for therapists, gyms and spas, along with a huge range of wellness signifiers to find out which cities in the UK value their inhabitants’ wellness the most.

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to categorise our study, we’ve looked at a variety of features across:

• Physical Wellness
• Skin Wellness
• Mental Wellness
• Intimate Wellness

We identified 3 top trends from each area and gave each city a score out of 48 to calculate the overall total.

We’ve looked at the most populous cities in the countries to get the broadest, most accurate picture possible of British wellness.

Key Findings

1. Norwich is the wellness capital of the UK, coming first for both physical and mental wellbeing.
2. Exeter is the home of skin wellness in the UK.
3. Bath tops the list for intimate wellness.

Top 5 Wellness Capitals

Norwich – the home of physical wellbeing

We ranked cities on the number of gyms and spas per 10,000 people, as well as the prevalence of popular fitness-related hashtags on Instagram.

While Chester came out number 1 for gyms and spas, it’s Instagram engagement was low, allowing the other four cities to push ahead. 

The cities taking care of their skin

This ranking looks at searches for ‘skincare routine’ and facials in each city, as well as pollution levels, as polluted air can contribute to damaged, unhealthy skin.

Some of the highest-ranked cities in the top 5 recorded the highest levels of pollution, which may influence how often people are looking to take care of their skin online.

Mental wellness is a priority in these cities

To understand how people approach mental wellness in each city, we looked at Google search data around popular strategies like mindfulness and meditation, as well as the number of therapists available on Google.

Most of the cities in the top 5 overall scored highly for mental wellbeing, suggesting a broad access to licensed therapists and an active interest in popular coping techniques.

Bath has the highest interest in intimate wellness

What we mean by intimate wellness is an awareness and desire to develop our sexual and relational wellbeing. To find how each city performed in this area, we used Google search data around sex toys and couples therapists, as well as the number of practicing sexual therapists.

Bath only slightly outranked Norwich in this category, with other top 5 city Cambridge also placing highly in each of the ranking factors.

Top 20 Cities

The UK’s most popular celebrity wellness brands

In addition to examining the wellness practices of the UK, we’ve also delved into the UK’s favourite celebrity wellness brands.

For better or worse, celebrity wellness brands are a major part of health culture, spanning skincare, fitness and holistic wellness. Brands like Goop by Gwyneth Paltrow and Fabletics by Kate Hudson are worth millions internationally, but which brands do Brits like best?

Methodology

For each form of wellness, we identified 3 signifying factors with which we could measure appetite and availability for wellbeing improvement.

Facials [city] searches – Google

Sex toy searches – Google

For the celebrity wellness data, we used Ahrefs to identify the monthly search volume in the UK.