The UK’s Top Cities for Gardening Loving Renters

Most ‘gardener-friendly’ locations for UK renters

As lockdown has gripped the nation, millions have looked to take up new hobbies in their homes to fill their time. One of those hobbies is gardening, with Google seeing a 15-year high in search interest in April and May 2020 as people across the country seek to become closer to nature while restricted to the confines of their homes.

To help these new green advocates and garden lovers, we analysed the UK’s 25 largest cities by population figures, to determine the most ‘gardener-friendly’ locations for renters, and their newfound gardening skills. The analysis used several criteria points to score each of the cities against which we then used to work out an overall rank for each city.

Ranked: The UK’s 25 major cities for garden and green lovers

Rank	City
1	Wolverhampton
2	Newport
3	Manchester
4	Derby
5	Coventry
6	Leeds
6	Stoke-on-Trent
8	Southampton
9	Bristol
10	Birmingham
11	Sunderland
11	Bradford
13	Kingston upon Hull
14	Preston
15	Leicester
15	Edinburgh
17	Cardiff
18	Sheffield
19	London
19	Nottingham
19	Plymouth
22	Belfast
23	Glasgow
24	Swansea
25	Liverpool

Gardener friendly cities for renters

Our research reveals that Wolverhampton is the UK’s most gardener friendly city for renters, performing well across all areas, particularly for the number of garden centres and open fields per 100,000 of their population.

Newport and Manchester made up the rest of the top three ‘gardener friendly’ cities in the UK for renters, coming in second and third place, respectively. Derby and Coventry came in close behind, ranking at fourth and fifth position.

Ranking factors include percentage of available rentals with a garden, terrace or balcony, and the number of allotments, garden centres and parks or fields per 100,000 people in the populations.

Methodology

Our methodology involved analysing existing data and reputable sources.

The UK’s 25 major cities by population figures were analysed and the below four criteria points were analysed for each city:

Percentage of rental properties with a garden, terrace, or balcony – this data was pulled from Zoopla’s website search feature.
Number of allotments per 100,000 people – this data was taken from council websites and are therefore inclusive of council run allotments only.
Number of garden centres in the area per 100,000 people – this data was taken from Yell’s search feature.
Number of fields/parks per 100,000 people – these were all taken from Field In Trust’s website of fields they protect.

Each of the cities were then ranked for each of the above criteria points, before an average rank across all aspects gave the final ranking number known as the ‘overall index number’. Desk research sources for each criterion is available on request.

Data sources are as follows:

zoopla.co.uk
Individual Council websites
yell.com
fieldsintrust.org/fields

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About the author

Alison Wild Bcom Hons MAAT MATT Taxation Technician Commercial Tax Pensions Insurance And Marketing Specialist Author Alison Wild BCom (Hons), FMAAT, MATT, Taxation Technician is a highly respected industry professional who has been working with and advising SMEs in areas including tax, pensions, insurance and marketing for over 25 years. She is a member of the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) and Association of Tax Technicians (ATT) and also has over 20 years' experience as a residential landlord.