Fast, easy food is more popular than ever. In fact, it’s estimated that about half of the average Briton’s meals are cooked outside of the home. Such as through restaurant dining, a quick meal deal, takeaways — or with food delivered to the door.
And because we’re a nation obsessed with ordering in, we thought we would look at the best places to live in the UK if you’re looking for some fine at-home dining. And also at the worst places — areas where you’re probably sticking to the weekly food shop for good reason.
Here’s what we found:
The best and worst places for food delivery in the UK
Where does your hometown come on the list?
| # | Town/City | No. of residents for every delivery option |
| 1 | Salford | 94 |
| 2 | Stockport | 139 |
| 3 | Gateshead | 140 |
| 4 | Portsmouth | 169 |
| 5 | Sale | 192 |
| 6 | Oldham | 192 |
| 7 | London | 211 |
| 8 | Sutton Coldfield | 258 |
| 9 | Bedford | 262 |
| 10 | Preston | 278 |
| 11 | Watford | 280 |
| 12 | St Albans | 281 |
| 13 | Brighton | 302 |
| 14 | Rochdale | 306 |
| 15 | Gillingham | 312 |
| 16 | Maidstone | 315 |
| 17 | Solihull | 317 |
| 18 | Cambridge | 325 |
| 19 | Doncaster | 326 |
| 20 | Stevenage | 352 |
| 21 | Lincoln | 353 |
| 22 | Halifax | 355 |
| 23 | Blackburn | 356 |
| 24 | Wakefield | 356 |
| 25 | Bournemouth | 359 |
| 26 | Worcester | 364 |
| 27 | Colchester | 366 |
| 28 | Barnsley | 368 |
| 29 | Crawley | 370 |
| 30 | Cheltenham | 374 |
| 31 | Newcastle upon Tyne | 377 |
| 32 | Nottingham | 383 |
| 33 | Manchester | 399 |
| 34 | Hastings | 403 |
| 35 | Rotherham | 404 |
| 36 | Chester | 404 |
| 37 | Reading | 409 |
| 38 | Southend-on-Sea | 410 |
| 39 | Bath | 413 |
| 40 | High Wycombe | 416 |
| 41 | Slough | 418 |
| 42 | Oxford | 419 |
| 43 | Hemel Hempstead | 421 |
| 44 | Grimsby | 428 |
| 45 | Aberdeen | 430 |
| 46 | Eastbourne | 440 |
| 47 | Basildon | 443 |
| 48 | Weston-super-Mare | 449 |
| 49 | Woking | 450 |
| 50 | Wigan | 452 |
| 51 | Exeter | 459 |
| 52 | Chelmsford | 461 |
| 53 | Nuneaton | 464 |
| 54 | Norwich | 473 |
| 55 | Newport | 475 |
| 56 | York | 476 |
| 57 | Milton Keynes | 477 |
| 58 | Leicester | 485 |
| 59 | St Helens | 508 |
| 60 | Southampton | 514 |
| 61 | Cardiff | 516 |
| 62 | Chesterfield | 518 |
| 63 | Worthing | 522 |
| 64 | Basingstoke | 532 |
| 65 | Wolverhampton | 534 |
| 66 | Glasgow | 538 |
| 67 | Edinburgh | 538 |
| 68 | Hartlepool | 560 |
| 69 | Bolton | 567 |
| 70 | Ipswich | 569 |
| 71 | Southport | 570 |
| 72 | Coventry | 572 |
| 73 | Birkenhead | 579 |
| 74 | Northampton | 580 |
| 75 | Peterborough | 592 |
| 76 | Huddersfield | 595 |
| 77 | Leeds | 601 |
| 78 | Darlington | 604 |
| 79 | Gloucester | 609 |
| 80 | Belfast | 639 |
| 81 | Luton | 648 |
| 82 | Swindon | 653 |
| 83 | Plymouth | 666 |
| 84 | Dundee | 671 |
| 85 | Telford | 679 |
| 86 | Blackpool | 687 |
| 87 | Swansea | 699 |
| 88 | Warrington | 732 |
| 89 | Middlesbrough | 750 |
| 90 | Bristol | 769 |
| 91 | Rayleigh | 778 |
| 92 | Sunderland | 785 |
| 93 | Derby | 830 |
| 94 | Sheffield | 836 |
| 95 | Liverpool | 848 |
| 96 | Bradford | 864 |
| 97 | Poole | 877 |
| 98 | Birmingham | 949 |
| 99 | Stoke-on-Trent | 969 |
| 100 | Kingston upon Hull | 1,061 |
Here are our main “takeaways” from the list
- FOUR of the top six locations are all in the Greater Manchester area with Oldham just missing out in sixth place.
- In Salford, there is a stunning one delivery option for every 94 people. That’s more than 10 times better than in Hull, where there’s just one delivery option for every 1,061 residents.
- Gateshead — a modest town in the north of England has one of the highest ratios of delivery options to people in the entire country. Who would have guessed?
- The only location in the south of the UK to be featured in the top 5 is Portsmouth, with one delivery option for every 169 people.
And for the bad:
- Poor Kingston-upon-Hull was the only major city to have more than a thousand residents for every delivery option. Making it ten times worse off than the top spot, Salford.
- Mega-city Birmingham also had a surprisingly poor choice of food given it’s diverse and huge population — with one delivery option for every 949 people.
Although it didn’t quite make it into the bottom five (it just missed out, being in 95th out of 100) we were also surprised by major city Liverpool’s lack of prominence on the list.
Looking at London
London has a bigger population than many European countries. So we thought it worth looking at each of the 32 boroughs individually.
| # | Borough | No. of residents for every delivery option |
| 1 | Kensington and Chelsea | 69 |
| 2 | Islington | 82 |
| 3 | Hammersmith and Fulham | 90 |
| 4 | Camden | 96 |
| 5 | Hackney | 99 |
| 6 | Tower Hamlets | 107 |
| 7 | Southwark | 164 |
| 8 | Merton | 168 |
| 9 | Lambeth | 171 |
| 10 | Westminster | 173 |
| 11 | Wandsworth | 179 |
| 12 | Haringey | 184 |
| 13 | Harrow | 218 |
| 14 | Kingston upon Thames | 242 |
| 15 | Brent | 251 |
| 16 | Lewisham | 253 |
| 17 | Newham | 257 |
| 18 | Waltham Forest | 277 |
| 19 | Ealing | 283 |
| 20 | Barking & Dagenham | 289 |
| 21 | Richmond upon Thames | 294 |
| 22 | Sutton | 294 |
| 23 | Greenwich | 320 |
| 24 | Hounslow | 343 |
| 25 | Redbridge | 378 |
| 26 | Havering | 509 |
| 27 | Hillingdon | 521 |
| 28 | Bexley | 533 |
| 29 | Bromley | 538 |
| 30 | Croydon | 538 |
| 31 | Enfield | 662 |
| 32 | Barnet | 978 |
All of the areas in Greater London with the fewest delivery option choices tend to be in boroughs on the fringes. Bexley, Bromley and Croydon all hug each other in the southwest. And Enfield and Barnet are the two northernmost boroughs. If we move slightly further up the list this pattern is repeated — Hillingdon, Havering and Redbridge are all fringe boroughs. The top 5 London boroughs — perhaps unsurprisingly — are all located right in the centre of Greater London. Where tourist hotspots are denser and where residential populations tend to be lower.
But in terms of the number of delivery options per head, all of the boroughs serve their takeaway-hungry customers quite well — with the exception of Enfield and Barnet. Croydon, the third worst performing borough, would stand on its own in position 67 if included in the top 100 towns and cities list above.
Methodology
We looked at the 100 biggest UK cities and towns by population using ONS data. Then for each location, we input a postcode representative of the city or town centre into Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats and counted the number of available delivery options. We then divided this total by the population of the town/city to determine which location had the most (or least) delivery options to service that population. We did this around 4pm on each of the websites on typical working days.
Here’s how we got the details for each of the delivery platforms specifically:
For Just Eat we used this search string: [Location] site:[Website URL]. For example, Derby site:just-eat.co.uk. This brought up a centralised, location-centre postcode automatically — usually as the first result. In any case, we only used results returned from the first relevant result on Google for the data. For Just Eat the number of eateries is clearly displayed at the top of the page during a search. But we also included the number of restaurants taking pre-orders (you can find that total if you scroll down the page).
For Deliveroo, to get a total count, we would sort by “delivery” and “distance” after searching for the city centre of each respective location. The grand total of restaurants would then appear at the top.
For Uber Eats, we would again sort by city centre, and then filter by “Rating” as that would always return a number — and the largest number of restaurant options.
*Data collected across 21-23 June 2021 during standard working hours.
