Where are Britain’s loneliest places in lockdown?
I think this is a big story – a number of the local authority areas on the list have rural components – most notably places like North Lincolnshire, which belie the simplistic rural/urban divide suggested in this article, which tells us:
Loneliness during the Covid lockdown has been much more intense in poorer, urban areas and places with a higher proportion of young people, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
A study has mapped the factors that makes loneliness more likely in different parts of Britain.
Former industrial towns with higher unemployment were more lonely.
While affluent and older populations were less likely to experience high levels of lockdown loneliness.
And high streets with good local businesses can make a positive difference.
The latest research from the ONS shows the overlapping factors linked to the highest levels of loneliness.
Urban areas, particularly those with declining industries, and higher rates of unemployment and crime, are more vulnerable to loneliness.
The study found a particularly strong link during the pandemic between joblessness and loneliness in towns and cities outside London.
The ONS cautions against reading too much into individual local figures, but levels of “often or always” lonely are double the national average in places including:
Blackburn
Middlesbrough
Hartlepool
North Lincolnshire
Corby
Mansfield
Tameside
Wycombe
As previous studies have shown, young adults, even before they were cut off from their social lives during the pandemic, are much more likely to report feelings of loneliness than older people.
In these self-reported feelings of loneliness, 16 to 24-year-olds were five times more likely to say they had felt lonely in the past seven days than those 65 to 74-year-olds.