01
Exploring seasonality of English towns
The seasonality of a town directly shapes its high street, and until you understand that, it's hard to even have the debate properly.
Walk down a seasonal high street and the shops tell you everything: arcades, fudge shops, ice cream parlours, surf hire, built around ten weeks of visitors. Half the units go dark every November, staff get hired and let go on the same cycle, and the closures cluster in January and February, once the Christmas money's gone, not when trade was actually bad. It pushes up rent too: a seasonal business can cover a year's lease in ten good weeks, so it outbids the launderette that actually needs the rent to be affordable.
And it's not just Newquay. The same rhythm plays out in coastal town after coastal town: Skegness, Blackpool, Scarborough, all judged all year round by numbers that really only describe August.
02
Newquay vs St Austell
Same constituency, same MP, same funding formulas. Must be hard to have the high street strategy debate! Difference in seasonality is significant:
Blue is Newquay, waving up and down every year. Orange is St Austell, just up the road, staying flat. The shaded bits are Universal Credit's rollout and COVID furlough, both unrelated to seasons, so look at the clear years either side.
03
National
Every English town large enough to measure, on one map and in one ranked list. Filter by local authority, reliability, or coastal status.
The national ranking
Loading… large enough to measure reliably. Confidence interval shown: a narrow rank is not the same as a narrow interval.
| # | Town | Percentile | Amplitude | 95% CI | Mean claimants | Local authority |
|---|
04
Trends of interest
A couple of interesting trends.
Not just a coastal story
Coastal towns show up more near the top of the ranking, but they're still a minority there.
72% of the top 50 aren't coastal at all. This is about tourism economies, not coastlines.
Not a deprivation story
Each dot is a town. If seasonality tracked deprivation, seasonal towns would cluster on one side. They don't (r = -0.078, essentially zero). A town can look completely average on deprivation and still be highly seasonal, which is why funding formulas built on IMD miss it.
05
Methodology and caveats
The proxy is the weakest link in this analysis, and it is stated plainly rather than in a footnote.