The fenced-off and undecorated Christmas Tree outside the betting shop in St Leonards suggests there may be some truth in Hastings’ new moniker of ‘Grinch Capital’. Photograph by Erica Smith

Official: Hastings is the ‘Grinch capital’ of the UK!

A new study reveals UK cities with the least interest in Christmas, and Hastings proves to be head and shoulders above them all as the Grinchiest and least Christmas-loving. The Grinch list is a motley crew of rich and poor places to live. Erica Smith pulls on her Santa hat and sets off to investigate the stats.

Hastings, in East Sussex, is officially the UK’s ‘Grinchiest’ city, with fewer Christmas-related searches per 100,000 people than anywhere else in the country. Watford is the UK’s second Grinchiest city, Oxford is the third and Rotherham sixth in the list. It’s an unusual collection of places to live.

The study, by leading SEO platform Ahrefs, analyzed 80 of the most popular Christmas-related keywords, including ‘Christmas’, ‘How many days until Christmas’, ‘Christmas movies’, ‘Christmas gift ideas’, and ‘Christmas music’, in every UK city with a population above 100,000 people. This allowed them to calculate which cities had the fewest Christmas-related searches per 100,000 residents, discovering the UK’s top ten ‘Grinch’ cities.

At the other end of the scale, Bolton is the most Christmas-obsessed city in the UK. Bolton has 10,967 Christmas-themed searches per 100,000 people – the highest number of Christmas-related searches in the whole nation, and 10 times as many searches as Hastings residents bother to make.

Lee Henry, Bolton-born but now a resident of St Leonards said, “I enjoyed Christmas as a kid, but I’m not that fussed about it now. All that ‘buying stuff’ – I’d rather the money went to charity to be honest.” Perhaps Lee chose to settle in Hastings because he likes the anti-consumer vibe here.

Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, commented on the findings. He said: “It is fascinating to see how interest in the Christmas season varies from city to city in the UK, with some cities showing comparatively little interest in Christmas, and some showing incredible enthusiasm for all things Christmas-related, from trees and decorations, to cosy Christmas pyjamas and gifts. Search interest can offer us powerful insights into festive trends”.

Confounding expectations

Is it too easy to put our grinch-score down to a combination of Poverty and Paganism? Looking at the groups of most- and least-grinchy places to live, grinchy Rotherham (one of the centres of racist riots over the summer) with a population of 129,897 has a religious makeup of 49.2% Christian and 9.6% Muslim, whilst Christmassy Bolton has a similar proportion of Christians to Rotherham and, at 17%, nearly twice as many Muslims. (Details from the 2021 census). Similarly, whilst well-heeled and academic Oxford and Cambridge are Grinchy, university towns like Edinburgh and Bristol feature on the Christmassy-list.

Kate Goldberg, from Manchester but now living in Croydon was amazed to see her home towns both on the Christmas-obsessed list. She said, “I wouldn’t have believed in a million years that Croydon would be on that list! At the moment it doesn’t feel Christmassy here – there’s not much money around and the town centre is really run down.” Kate suggested that all the towns on the Christmassy-list, apart from Edinburgh, are quite ordinary, down-to-earth places – so perhaps that’s why they might like decorating their houses at Christmas – a chance to bedazzle once a year.

Emma Dear, resident of Peterborough, and formerly resident in both Manchester and Edinburgh says, “Edinburgh and Manchester both have Christmas markets and Peterborough also has one, though hardly to the same standard. But we do a great line in Carol Singing at the Cathedral. I suspect anywhere that offers such delights will get lots of search engine hits.”

It is interesting to see that in Hastings only 42.4% of the population define as Christian and 53.5% of the population have no religious affinity. But surely you don’t have to be a regular church-going Christian to Google for ‘Christmas pyjamas’?

Methodology:
Ahrefs analyzed 80 of the most popular keywords relating to Christmas, including ‘Christmas’, ‘How many days until Christmas’, ‘Christmas movies’, ‘Christmas gift ideas’ and ‘Christmas music’. The total number of Christmas-related searches for each city was compared against its population to calculate the number of searches per 100,000 inhabitants.

A flaw in the research may be that according to the 2021 census, Hastings’ population is only 91,000. Whilst there has been an influx of new residents since the pandemic, it is unlikely we have anywhere near 100,000 residents yet, so our lower population level may have impacted on the average number of searches.

Personally, I suspect the issue may be that we have an older than average population who are more likely to go to a shop for Christmas gifts rather than order them from Amazon. More in-depth research needs to be carried out to really define which populations love or hate Christmas. But if nothing else, I think that discussing the Grinch Factor may lead us, as a town, to pay more attention to our two town-centre Christmas Trees which deserve a visit from a Westfield style consultant – and I mean from Westfield the village, not the shopping centre!

Image from Westfield Village Christmas Lights Facebook page. Thank you!

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