Click here for summaries of the quantity and quality of every attraction subcategory in 95 of the largest UK towns and cities.
We collected details of 30,540 visitor attractions from the UK’s 95 largest towns and cities found on Google in August of 2019. We searched for 20 subcategories of attractions: amusement parks, aquariums and zoos, art galleries, bars, beauty salons, bowling alleys, casinos, clothes shops, department stores, cinemas, museums, nightclubs, parks, pubs, shoe shops, shopping centres, spas and wellness centres, stadiums, street markets and theatres. The list of attraction subcategories was defined by selecting which of Google’s attraction types that can be queried are interesting for domestic or overseas visitors. We searched for attractions of each subcategory in every location by querying Google’s Places services using the search pattern ‘{attraction} in {town, county}’, e.g. ‘Bars in Basildon, Essex’. For every attraction, we collected its name, location coordinates, average review rating and the number of reviews it had received. We filtered out attractions from our analysis if they had received fewer than 10 reviews and if they were located beyond the town or city boundaries. We defined town boundaries where required using a search radius based on land area estimates from townslist.co.uk and governmental urban area districts.
We scored the availability of all 20 attraction subcategories in each location by summing the attractions’ Google ratings and dividing by town population sizes. This initial metric, therefore, considers the number of attractions available, the quality ratings of those attractions and accounts for the size of the location. We built a score for each attraction category (culture, nightlife, shopping or entertainment) by combining the availability scores for all its subcategories. When combining the subcategory scores, we gave more weight to subcategories that are nationally rare – for example, stadiums are rarer than cinemas, so scoring highly for stadiums makes a location more distinct than cinemas would. Attraction category scores were boosted if a high percentage of attractions were rated 4 or higher out of 5. A location’s category score was penalised if it didn’t have at least one attraction for every subcategory, which means locations with a diverse variety of attractions also got a boost to their scores.
Our data set is only as complete as Google’s directory for places of interest. There may be a small number of visitor attractions that are not listed in relevant searches on Google Maps (and Places API). Our results represent the state of the UK’s hidden tourist capitals in August of 2019, and as businesses open and close, results could vary over time.
Sources
* https://www.visitbritain.org/town-data
** https://www.bournemouth.co.uk/ideas-and-inspiration/news/2017/7/25/bournemouth-latest-facts-a2472