LONDON, 21st January 2015: The village of West Malling in Kent is more famous for its historic buildings and cricketing heritage than for its nightlife. But singletons would be well-advised to take a second look at its quaint surroundings in order to bag themselves a date, according to data released today by match.com.
The village (population 2,266) has been named as the town in Britain with the highest number of active daters in proportion to its population, closely followed by Northallerton in North Yorkshire (population 16,832) and Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire (population 23,937). Both West Malling and Northallerton have more than eight times as many daters per 1000 people than the national average.
The full list of the top 20 towns is as follows:
- West Malling, Kent
- Northallerton, North Yorkshire
- Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
- Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire
- Prescot, Merseyside
- Cheadle, Greater Manchester
- Stockton Heath, Cheshire
- Epsom, Surrey
- Leigh-On-Sea, Essex
- Windsor, Berkshire
- Truro, Cornwall
- Marlborough, Wiltshire
- Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
- Cirencester, Gloucestershire
- Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
- Chichester, West Sussex
- Bridgnorth, Shropshire
- Banstead, Surrey
- Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire
- Marlow, Buckinghamshire
To conduct the study, match.com analysed all of the users that accessed its website or mobile app during the weekend of the 3rd and 4th of January, its busiest of the year. After discounting towns with fewer than 50 active users, the number of daters in each town was compared with data from the 2011 census to calculate the ratio of active singles to population. More than 500 towns and cities from across the UK were analysed as part of the project.
Karl Gregory, UK and European MD of match.com, comments: “This is the first time that match.com has released an in-depth snapshot of where single daters in the UK are residing, and the results may surprise some people. Although large cities like London, Birmingham and Glasgow have the highest number of singles in total, their greater populations mean that they are not as concentrated as in these smaller hotspots.
“Some of these are more easily explained than others. Aberdeen, for example, has a number of workers who have re-located to the city due to its oil industry, and people in a new town may be more likely to use dating sites to find a partner or just meet some new people. Places such as West Malling and Northallerton though, are a bit more of a mystery. We can only assume than in smaller towns such as these, good news spreads fast, and that those who have found dates or met a partner through sites like match.com recommend their friends also try the service.”
Notes to editors:
Match.com data collected 3rd and 4th January 2015. Population data sourced from 2011 census via www.lovemytown.co.uk: http://www.lovemytown.co.uk/populations/TownsTable1.asp.
Towns with fewer than 50 active match users were discounted from analysis