Survey Reveals Birmingham as the Cleanest Place in the UK
We would like to officially declare Birmingham as the cleanest place in the UK.
This is based upon a survey carried out by retailer House of Bath, and their resultant Cleaning Map of Great Britain. Over 2000 household customers were analysed over the last 6 months to suss out exactly what cleaning products have been sold to detect what’s happening in the dirt-killing world of household cleaning.
These products have included window cleaner, floor cleaner, dusters, furniture cleaner, bathroom brushes, and kitchen organisers. Taken across the UK they have then summarised these by region and towns, with the top-of-the-list locations being ones with most cleaning products being purchased and therefore fairly-assumed to be the most active when it comes to cleaning.
And the great news is that Birmingham is top of this list, followed then by Belfast, Portsmouth, Brighton, and Tunbridge Wells. Out of 122 locations that’s pretty impressive! Looking at the opposite end of the scale, the bottom five locations are East London, Central London, Lerwick (Shetland Islands), Llandrindod Wells (Wales), and Halifax.
If you want to really drill down into some more detail, Birmingham and Belfast are top of the list when it comes to buying bathroom brushes in particular, whereas Portsmouth and Peterborough when it comes to dusters. A few more interesting stats on this are:
• In Belfast there are 89% more purchases of floor cleaner than East London.
• In Halifax, people buy 50% less window cleaner than Brighton folk.
• For Portsmouth, oven cleaner is the most popular household cleaning item with 92% more sales than Llandrindod Wells in mid Wales.
In terms of why this was first carried out, the House of Bath wanted to see whether recent comments by the TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp mirrored reality. The other month on Twitter she tweeted “In 15 years of going around the country house hunting I have observed that the further north you go from London the cleaner the homes are”.
Kay Hutcheson from House of Bath said, “Although UK homeowners in general are taking more care of their homes than ever before, it’s clear that there are still some areas that need to put a bit more elbow grease in…Kirsty’s comments sparked such a great debate we felt compelled to look into the truth behind the statement. And in terms of the extreme end of the results where London came in lowest, she is spot on”.
Going further into the reasoning for these trends, those in the south apparently attribute their dislike of housework to not having enough spare time and socialising away from home, whereas those in the south focusing on family gatherings and being more house-proud.
But back to Birmingham though, this sheds a whole new light on the north-south debate anyway. With Birmingham being top-of-the-list and the cleanest place in the UK, then it’s actually the Midlands that tops the bill. Well done Birmingham!
