Methodology
To reveal the top wellness hotspot locations in the UK, we sourced the location of each health retreat on Eventbrite, filtering by ‘retreat’ and ‘health’ on 13/02/2024. We excluded all online events. We used the county or region of each retreat to form our seed list and looked at all regions with at least five retreats.
We sourced the number of walking trails for each location using All Trails, looking at ‘walking’ trails under the activity filter on 14/02/2024. We calculated the number of walking trails per 100 square miles of each location using the area of each location sourced from Population Data and where unavailable Wikipedia.
We sourced the average tree coverage rounded to the nearest whole number for each location using Forestry Maps on 14/02/2024.
We sourced the number of sports complexes in each location using Tripadvisor and calculated the number of highly-rated sports complexes rounded to the nearest whole number, looking at sports complexes rated four out of five stars and above on 14/02/2024.
We sourced the number of gyms and yoga studios within five miles of each area’s most populous city/town sourced from the Office for National Statistics using Yelp on 14/02/2024, by searching for ‘gym’ and ‘yoga’.
We sourced the air quality index of each area’s most populous city/town using AccuWeather on 14/02/2024.
For Lanarkshire, we calculated the total area, number of walking trails, number of retreats, number of spas and highly-rated spas, number of sports complexes and highly-rated sports complexes, number of gyms, and number of yoga studios in North and South Lanarkshire. We calculated the average tree coverage of North and South Lanarkshire.
We gave each location a normalised score out of 10, based on the factors above, before calculating an average score out of 10 for each location. We gave a weighting of two to the factors: number of mindfulness retreats, number of walking trails per 100 square miles, gyms within five miles of the most populous city and yoga studios within five miles of the most populous city. We gave these factors a weighting of two as the NHS details the impact of mindfulness and gentle yoga alongside walking outside and regular exercise on mental and physical well-being. We gave a weighting of 0.5 to the air quality index of the most populous city. This allowed us to calculate which locations are the best wellness hotspots in the UK.
1 NHS
2 Mind
3 European Centre for Environment and Human Health
4 The Sleep Foundation
5 Healthline
6 World Health Organization
7 British Journal of Psychiatry