74 With household budgets still tight, people are increasingly turning to lowcost creative hobbies at home and in community settings rather than expensive nights out. Searches for ‘arts and crafts’ receive a huge 27,000 per month and wider terms around arts and crafts classes accumulate over 11,000 searches a month across the UK. In light of this, Paper High have conducted research into where in the UK has the most creative communities, and surprisingly the top spot isn’t taken by London. They analysed the number of searches per 100,000 residents across cities across five categories: craft & paper making, writing & journalling, garden and allotments, tech & digital making and general creative classes. Taking the top spot overall is Norwich, with a per capita score of 659 searches per 100,000 residents, more than three and a half times the rate of London and nearly 10 per cent ahead of secondplaced Oxford. The city ranked in the top two across every single hobby category in the study, suggesting a broad and embedded creative culture rather than strength in just one area. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Norwich has long had a reputation as a cultural city, home to a thriving independent arts scene and one of the UK’s leading creative writing programmes at the University of East Anglia, and the search data bears that reputation out in numbers. In second place, Oxford scores 602 per 100,000 residents, performing strongly across all five hobby categories with particularly high scores in writing, gardening and tech. The city’s dense population of students, academics and independent makers appears to translate directly into active demand for creative communities and classes. Oxford is the only city in the study to score above 90 per capita in every single hobby cluster, making it the most well-rounded creative city outside of Norwich. Manchester rounds out the top three with a per capita score of 417, and is one of only two cities to beat Norwich in any individual category, taking the crown for Craft & Paper Making with an exceptional score of 232 per 100,000 residents, by From papercrafts and creative classes to allotments and journalling, Britons are finding new ways to express themselves. We explore the cities leading the UK’s growing creative movement. BRITAIN’S TOP CRAFTING CITIES Tanaphong Toochinda
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0NTE=