EDINBURGH’S historic High Street has been named the healthiest of any city in the UK, according to research published yesterday by the Royal Society for Public Health.
Judged on high street health both economically and environmentally, the top 10 in the RSPH study of 70 towns and cities were Edinburgh, Canterbury, Taunton, Shrewsbury, Cheltenham, York, Brighton & Hove, Eastbourne, Exeter and Cambridge .
With the rankings based on the types of shops found in the high streets, the bottom ten, starting with the unhealthiest, were Grimsby, Walsall, Blackpool, Stoke-On-Trent, Sunderland, Northampton, Bolton, Wolverhampton, Huddersfield and Bradford.
The league table features in the new RSPH report, Health on the High Street: Running on empty, which follows on from the announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of a package of measures designed to reinvigorate the nation’s high streets.
The report updates the methodology used in the first report in 2015, to reflect the changing face of the British high street, adding off-licences and empty shops to the negative influences on health, and cafes and vape shops to the positive influences.
The number of fast food shops grew by 4000 between 2014 and 2017, especially in the most deprived areas, which now have five times more fast food shops than the most affluent areas. The number of vape shops has doubled from 1000 to 2000 in the past three years.
Calling for backing for local authorities, 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.”
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