Edinburgh rated as Britain’s healthiest high street

The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) has ranked 70 of Britain’s major towns and cities by the impact of their high streets on the public’s health and well-being.

The 2018 league table, produced based on the prevalence of different types of businesses found in the towns’ main retail areas, has rated Grimsby as having the unhealthiest high street and Edinburgh as the healthiest.

Trailing Grimsby as the unhealthiest high streets, Walsall, Blackpool, Stoke-On-Trent and Sunderland made up the bottom five, with the RSPH revealing that average life expectancy for people living in areas with the top 10 healthiest high streets is two and a half years longer than for those in the 10 unhealthiest ranked areas.

Alongside the Scottish capital, Canterbury, Taunton, Shrewsbury and Cheltenham also featured in the top five healthiest cities.

The report says that changes to British high streets that have influenced the rankings include: a growth in the number of fast food shops by 4,000 between 2014 and 2017, especially in the most deprived areas; the number of vape shops doubling from 1,000 to 2,000 in the past three years; and the high street vacancy rate increasing from below seven per cent in 2007 to 11 per cent in 2017.

Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the RSPH, said: “While the face of the British high street continues to change, the environmental and economic factors that influence inequalities in health outcomes across the country remain stubbornly intractable. Our Health on the High Street rankings illustrate how unhealthy businesses concentrate in areas which already experience higher levels of deprivation, obesity and lower life expectancy. Reshaping these high streets to be more health-promoting could serve as a tool to help redress this imbalance.

“Local authorities, who are well placed to make changes, are currently operating with one hand tied behind their backs due to ongoing funding cuts, particularly in some of the more deprived areas that feature prominently in these rankings. Many local authorities are doing good work with the resources they have, but they need to be backed, both financially and with enhanced powers, by central government if they are to succeed in reshaping high streets for the better.”

The Health on the High Street: Running on empty report follows the Chancellor’s budget announcement of a package of measures designed to reinvigorate the nation’s High Streets, and is the second report following the first ranking in 2015.