UK’s Craftiest Cities Report
By: Team LibertyA recent survey of over 45,000 people by Statista found that DIY arts and crafts were the hobbies of choice for over 26% of respondents. This should come as no surprise when you consider how hands-on crafting can be; a feast for the senses compared to the sterile and flat digital world we live in now.
Instead, crafting is a hands-on experience. You get to feel the texture and flow of beautiful fabrics in your hands and run the exquisite printed designs between your fingers before choosing what is going to be part of your next crafting project. If you are making a dress you can also choose from a range of dressmaking patterns.
Crafting has always been a popular pastime in the UK. It teaches you new skills, and you can discover how to create unique and personal items that simply can’t be found anywhere else. You also get the benefit of learning how to mend clothing and other items instead of throwing them away, which saves you money too.
It can sometimes be hard knowing where to start, and shops like Liberty offer a wide variety of fabric choices which can be overwhelming. If you’re new to crafts like dressmaking, we can help in a variety of ways. See our list of helpful resources at the end of this article. With a hobby that can be both rewarding, relaxing, and really let you stretch your creativity, it’s no wonder crafting has become so popular!
We undertook a research project to explore different crafting hobbies throughout the UK, including what people are searching for, what they craft, and how they buy their supplies. We wanted to see exactly how crafty each UK city is. Discover our detailed results below; we were surprised by some of the data we found - maybe you will be too
What we found
The Covid-19 pandemic left us all with a lot of time on our hands, and it’s no surprise that many hobbies became more popular almost overnight.
Broad Google Trends data for ‘sewing’ saw a big spike in April 2020 as lockdown began and we all had more time on our hands. A longer-term trend we saw was the increasing popularity of crochet. In 2022, crochet overtook knitting in popularity for the first time. We saw a similar trend in the USA, but there crocheting has been taking the lead since 2010. As you would expect, search interest for both types of crafts was highly seasonal with interest peaking in the colder months.
For our more detailed investigation, we examined 76 different data points for the top 88 cities in the UK. This included search data, local crafting resources, and social media interest. After laying it all out we ended up with a final rank for each city. When we looked closer at the data, we discovered a lot more. London ranked as the best city overall, which should come as no surprise given its close history with arts, design and fashion. On the other hand, the discovery that two Scottish cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, were the most popular cities for sewing and knitting respectively was a pleasant surprise. And would you have thought that both Oxford and Cambridge would make it into the top 5 thriftiest cities in the country?
For more on how we put this list together, we’ve supplied a detailed methodology at the end.
See the most popular places, the most popular crafts, and some surprising facts you never knew.
Result
Craftiest Cities
We scored the craftiest cities in the country by totalling their individual scores in each area.
London
It should come as no surprise that London took the overall top spot in our survey. The nation’s capital is a global centre for design and creativity, so it makes perfect sense that this creative passion should filter down from the professional level. The capital ranked first across a range of categories, including search data and Instagram craft hashtags. We found 189 different fabric shops alone in London, more than 4x the next most-stocked city of Birmingham. The city is also extremely well represented by the Craft Council, with 227 members here. That’s more than 11x Birmingham. Finally, London benefits from top universities such as Central Saint Martins, as well as a thriving arts scene; so its position here is well-deserved.
Rotherham
Rotherham in South Yorkshire turned out to be Britain’s worst city for crafting in our survey. Its smaller population and area isn’t the problem as have accounted for this to make our results as fair as possible. What lets this city down was its lack of social media interest combined with poor results in education and key resources like knitting shops. In the end, there was no way Rotherham could compete with some of the more vibrant and creative cities in the UK.
Most popular craft activities in the UK
We pulled this data from Google searches to identify which are the most popular crafting activities in each city on our list.
| Craft | City | |
|---|---|---|
| Crochet | Brighton | Grimsby |
| Sewing | Glasgow | Newport |
| Knitting | Edinburgh | Newport |
| Pottery | Croydon | Newport |
| Fabrics | Brighton | Newport |
| Art | London | Newport |
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Most Social Cities
With social media now dominating how we communicate and learn, it made sense for us to investigate how crafting is taking advantage of this platform. We combined crafting hashtags from Instagram and TikTok to rank our cities.
Our top five results are all major cities in the UK. We made sure to account for different size populations in these cities but even so, the bigger metropolitan areas in the country still dominate this section. Their big student populations could have something to do with it.
| No. | City | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | London | Burton upon Trent |
| 2 | Leicester | Kingston upon Hull |
| 3 | Manchester | Southend-on-Sea |
| 4 | Edinburgh | Stoke-on-Trent |
| 5 | Birmingham | West Bromwich |
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Top city for social activity
For this, we combined crafting and city hashtags from the social platforms Instagram and Tik Tok. London leads the way for social network activity related to crafting. It should be no surprise that the nation’s capital tops the charts here, even after accounting for its large population.
Most retail opportunities
Online shopping is a fact of life today, but some goods lend themselves more readily to in-person shopping. When you are starting a new crafting project, getting to see and feel the materials you will be working with is ideal. You can always order online if you want to use the same materials in another project.
For this section, we searched map and business directory data to identify which cities had the most shops per square mile.
While you might have expected to find London at the top of the charts here; in fact, the most well-served city for craft shops of all kinds was Leicester. Brighton is an unsurprising entry on this list thanks to its thriving arts scene.
Chelmsford makes its second appearance as a ‘least popular’ city here.
| No. | City | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leicester | Rotherham |
| 2 | Brighton | Sunderland |
| 3 | Walsall | Newport |
| 4 | Newcastle under Lyme | York |
| 5 | Cheltenham | Chelmsford |
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Thriftiest cities
Thrift and charity shops can be a wonderful source of inspiration and sometimes an amazing place to find clothing and fabrics which can be reused in a new project. Accumulated stock can provide an eclectic mix of patterns and designs which you can use to bring your next creation to life.
The big metropolitan centres again dominate this category because bigger populations will cycle through clothing more quickly than smaller cities, so more shops will naturally follow.
Like the social results above, it’s possible the large student populations in these cities could have skewed the results. Regardless of the reason, there are certainly a lot of options here.
Grimsby in Lincolnshire sits in last place here.
| No. | City | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Edinburgh | Grimsby |
| 2 | Brighton | Newport |
| 3 | Cambridge | Burnley |
| 4 | Manchester | West Bromwich |
| 5 | Oxford | Newcastle under Lyme |
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Crafting Education
Crafting is a popular hobby for many of us, but some of us are fortunate enough to benefit from a formal education. Unsurprisingly, we found that university-level arts courses in fields like design, crafting and fabrics are limited to the nation’s bigger cities. London, of course, is home to more than one leading university in this field such as the London College of Fashion, and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
| No. | City | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | London | Rotherham (joint last) |
| 2 | Edinburgh | Sunderland (joint last) |
| 3 | Leicester (joint 3rd) | Newport (joint last) |
| 4 | Brighton (joint 3rd) | York (joint last) |
| 5 | Bradford (joint 3rd) | Chelmsford (joint last) |
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Summary
Crafting remains an extremely popular hobby and pastime across the UK. Our survey and analysis only touched on some of the more popular crafting activities, but the potential to learn, discover some new fabric, or develop your existing skills, has never been greater.
There is a wide range of shops and social support in most of the big cities so you will never be far from your next great discovery.
If crafting, particularly dressmaking, is new to you then you will be delighted to learn that Liberty is starting a new series on crafting, and you can find the first article on how to cut a pattern here. Our range of Tana Lawn Cotton is perfect for making your first dress.
To assemble our article, we had to be careful to only look at relevant data. We began by limiting our core list of cities to those with populations greater than 100,000, giving us 88 cities to work with.
Next, we investigated internet search data with help from Google. We used this to identify general crafting topics and interests. Related data was combined to build a more comprehensive picture across the UK. For example, we considered ‘sewing classes’ and ‘how to sew’ the same thing and grouped them accordingly.
Back in the real world, we needed to know what physical shops served each of these communities. For this data, we turned to Yelp and extracted business information based on their search data and internal tagging. In some cases, we had to limit the search radius where two metropolitan areas were close enough to each other that they would affect each other’s results.
For the social element of the research, we decided to limit our investigation to only Instagram and TikTok. Both have huge followings and vibrant crafting communities which we felt were representative enough for our needs.
Finally, we pulled additional data in the form of Craft Council membership and fashion programs, which we considered a strong indicator of crafting interest, even though this may have led to a professional career rather than a lifetime hobby.
Altogether, we ended up with 76 unique data points for each city on our list. This was ranked and weighted according to the local population and geographical area to ensure we could fairly compare different cities on an equal basis. Without this, big cities like London or Birmingham would dominate all the rankings simply because they are home to so many people.
Believe it or not, one unexpected risk to our data turned out to be video games. Just as in real life, virtual crafting has become a popular element of modern video games, and so it’s possible this could have polluted some of our data. We think that, if this is the case, it is most likely to be reflected in the social data, rather than brick-and-mortar shops, or internet searches for knitting.