ILLUSTRATION FERNANDO SAFONT
It’s tempting to think that we can live anywhere in the UK and feel comfortable being out about our relationships but outside of the most obvious cities, where are the places that LGBT people are choosing to live?
Ten years ago, a report from the University of Sussex listed the top 10 most “gay” places to live in England and Wales. The list started with Brighton & Hove and ended with Lewes in East Sussex. Naturally London, Manchester, Bristol, Oxford and Nottingham were on the list, as well as lesser-known enclaves in Blackpool, Bournemouth and Cambridge. I’m not aware of any follow-up studies to the research Darren Smith carried out and the most recent survey, by the Office for National Statistics, doesn’t list cities but focuses instead on the top five regions. These are London, obvs, the South East, the South West, Wales and Northern Ireland. So if we extrapolate from that additions to the list of cities where gay people live with relative ease, it would suggest that Cardiff and Belfast have become more gay-friendly in the intervening years. So too have more of the smaller coastal areas in the South East, stretching from Brighton all the way along the eastern seaboard to Eastbourne, Hastings, Rye, Margate, Ramsgate and Whitstable.