Revealed: The most isolated place in England and Wales – and how your town compares

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Set on the west Wales coast, the popular seaside town of New Quay is best known for its sandy beaches, links to Dylan Thomas and its resident pod of bottlenose dolphins in Cardigan Bay.

But it now has another, slightly more ambivalent accolade to its name – being within the most cut-off location in England and Wales.

According to an analysis by the Telegraph, homes in the area of New Quay & Penbryn are on average 6.8 miles from key amenities, such as large supermarkets, train stations, banks, schools, GPs and pubs.

Its main supermarkets – Tesco and Aldi – are 20 miles down the coast in Cardigan, while its closest train stations are in either Aberystwyth, a 40-minute drive up the coast, or Carmarthen, roughly an hour’s drive south.

New Quay’s status as the most cut-off town is closest rivalled by Bellingham in Northumberland, which had homes on average 6.3 miles from main amenities. While, unsurprisingly, the least cut off area is Whitechapel in Tower Hamlets in east London.

For New Quay residents, their isolated location means some locals think nothing of driving hours to find a shop they like – be it John Lewis, Waitrose or Primark.

Tracy Hay, 52, who owns the Starfish gift store, grew up in the area, then moved to Oxfordshire to work in banking, before returning home. She says: “Of course it’s isolated. It’s a 40-mile trip just to get food. And it’s difficult to get a delivery slot, especially in the summer.”

Hay used to work for JP Morgan in Canary Wharf, commuting in from Charlbury, in the Cotswolds. And she says living in New Quay is a completely different lifestyle.

Much of the rural area outside the town has no mobile phone signal, she explains.

She also drives 40 minutes to take her daughter, eight, for after-school activities, such as shooting, horse-riding and reciting, while one of her older sons, who has an accountancy degree, now milks cows on a local farm.

On occasions, Hay also travels to Cardiff – two hours 20 minutes drive away – to go shopping at John Lewis and Waitrose. “You could easily do nothing as the distances are so large, but then you’d feel trapped,” she says.

“You have to be prepared to get in the car and drive, even if it’s just for a good gym.”

She says New Quay felt more isolated when she lived here as a teenager. “I left as soon as I could at age 18. It felt like there was nothing here.

“Obviously, I was less isolated in Oxfordshire, but I had a two-hour commute into work, and was on the 5.28am train each morning. I eventually thought – what am I doing?

“Moving here was a great decision for my quality of life. And obviously, New Quay is rammed in the summer, so it certainly doesn’t feel isolated then.”

The town has a population of roughly 1,000, but numbers swell in the summer as tourists descend.

There is a local food shop – a small Costcutter – and the post office offers some banking services, with main branches of HSBC and Lloyds being in Cardigan. There’s a GP in town, and a small primary school for 100 children. For secondary school, most children get a bus to Aberaeron – roughly 20 minutes away - or Newcastle Emlyn, around half an hour’s drive.

Another local, Trinity Hancox, 23, works as a barmaid in the Jitterbug pub, with views over the Irish Sea. “It is isolated and the jobs are very seasonal. We are always short staffed in the summer.”

She says wages are low and properties are very expensive. “There is no way I can ever buy in New Quay, I will end up living in a village outside of it, further from the sea. They are a lot cheaper.”

She too travels long distances to go shopping. “I go to Swansea or Llanelli for Primark, both roughly an hour and a half away by car. “And the local cinema is in Cardigan. In the winter, this is a ghost town.”

Another resident, Carla Hogg, 48, adds: “The most annoying part is the airport. We have Cardiff, but most flights go from Bristol. So it’s a three-and-a-half hour drive just to get there.

“But we love it here. We use online banking and my husband works from home for a dairy tech firm. We have everything we need.”

The acceptance of the situation in New Quay is echoed in the second most cut-off spot – the quiet village of Bellingham, Northumberland.

Julie Kennedy, manager of The Cheviot Hotel, says locals get used to driving places.
She says: “The nearest train station is Hexham, a 35-minute drive away, and that’s where the supermarkets are too.

“We’re a small town but self-sufficient. We have a GP, chemist, butcher and small Co-op. We have a mobile Lloyds bank that comes once a fortnight for the time being.

“The secondary school kids have a 50-minute bus ride to Haydon Bridge, but you get used to it. The Internet is fine and it’s a beautiful place to live.”

The lack of amenities and services ties in with additional Telegraph data which reveals the rate at which rural facilities are closing. Our analysis has found that, since 2010, food stores have fallen by 12 per cent in urban constituencies. But in rural areas, they have plummeted by 28 per cent – more than double.

Pubs – once the lifeblood of communities – have fallen by 18 per cent in rural constituencies, compared to 11 per cent in urban ones over the same time period. Banks have closed slower in the countryside than they have in the cities – but they have still declined by 50 per cent since 2010 (compared to 57 per cent in more urban areas).

A recent report from the County Councils Network also found that more than one in four bus services had vanished over the last decade in rural areas, with passenger numbers dropping to a record low. This was more than in urban areas.

Brad Taylor, a rural transport campaigner from CPRE, the countryside charity, says: “Villages in many parts of Germany, Austria and Switzerland are served by hourly buses, 12 hours a day and 7 days a week.

“But in the UK, woeful and worsening public transport connections have left people in the countryside isolated and unable to access education, work and healthcare.

“Rural buses urgently need much higher levels of investment as well as integrated timetables and ticketing systems. Local authorities such as Cornwall are already showing the way forward on this – others must now follow suit.”

In terms of access to train stations, while on average homes in England and Wales are around 1.7 miles away, this can differ hugely in rural areas. In Bude & Stratton, Cornwall, for instance, the average home is 23 miles from a station.

With the decline in services, such as banks and shops, many in rural communities are more reliant on the Internet than those in urban areas. Yet, they also face significant challenges in getting access to fibre broadband, which offers the top speeds.

In 2019, Boris Johnson pledged “full-fibre for all by 2025” as part of his election campaign.
Yet today, only 58 per cent of people in urban areas have access, up from 10 per cent in 2019, with just 42 per cent in the rural areas (up from 12 per cent in 2019). At current rates, it will take another seven years for all rural areas to get access to full-fibre.

One of the worst places for the Internet is, again, in rural Wales. In Cwmisfael, just outside Carmarthen, local Richard Husband, 71, says: “We get seven million bits per second.

“It’s fast compared to what it was 20 years ago. But it’s very slow compared to what you might get in a city or with fibre. “If you try and watch a film it drops off.

“I did pay for fibre broadband at my office for a while, but it cost £60 a month so I stopped.”

In this part of Wales, just 17 per cent of households have superfast broadband. Nationally, 76 per cent have access to superfast broadband, which guarantees download speeds of more than 100 Mbits/s, recommended for larger households.

Most of the properties rely on the old copper-wire service, which struggles with high speeds. A spokesman for the Countryside Alliance, says: “There are several reasons why rural areas suffer with slower broadband speeds. Much of it comes down to cost.

“While providers are permitted to subsidise rural connections with profits they make from urban customers, it is still often uneconomical to lay fibre in those areas where only a few customers would pay for the service.

“The distance between properties in rural areas means it is much more expensive to connect them to faster broadband.”

Ernest Doku, broadband expert at Uswitch.com, adds: “While the average UK broadband speed is increasing year on year, not everyone is benefiting.

“We are seeing a large and growing gap between customers benefiting from ultrafast speeds and those who are getting the bare minimum.” Either way, rural areas face significant challenges.

Ben Lake, MP for Ceredigion, says: “Ceredigion is a wonderful place to live. However, living in a rural area in today’s economic climate is not without its challenges.

“The closure of bank branches, lack of decent connectivity, poor transport services, to name but a few challenges facing rural communities that warrant urgent attention.

If the UK Government is truly committed to levelling up, then it must prioritise investment in the economic and social infrastructure of rural communities. Failure to do so will only see the gap between urban and rural regions widen.”

The research by the Telegraph compared 7,200 geographic areas (Middle Layer Super Output Areas), which are designed to enable the reporting of small area statistics in England and Wales.