Isles of Scilly named friendliest place in England – and Barking least friendly

Scilly Tops New Social Cohesion Ranking as Barking and Dagenham Lands at the Bottom

Wanderstayfinder.com – A sweeping new assessment of social connectedness across every local authority in England has placed the remote Atlantic archipelago of the Isles of Scilly at the very top of the national table, while the London borough of Barking and Dagenham has been identified as the least socially cohesive area in the country. The finding emerges from a comprehensive index that scored all 296 local authority areas using official government statistics drawn from the community life survey, offering a granular picture of how Britons interact with their immediate surroundings and whether they feel anchored to a place.

What the Index Measures

Rather than relying on a single metric, the ranking blends several dimensions of everyday social life. It tracks how frequently residents engage in informal conversation with neighbours, gauges the prevalence of loneliness and the strength of local belonging, records expressions of pride in one’s area, and captures the degree to which people take part in civic activities such as volunteering, attending local meetings, or joining community groups. By combining these indicators, the index attempts to paint a fuller portrait of social fabric than any single survey question could achieve.

The Rankings: From Scilly to Stoke-on-Trent

Behind Scilly, the next four areas to register the strongest scores were South Hams in south Devon, West Devon, the Derbyshire Dales, and Richmond upon Thames in southwest London. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Barking and Dagenham sat at position 296. The remaining four areas completing the bottom five were Stoke-on-Trent, Ashfield, Mansfield, and Ipswich — a spread that cuts across the Midlands, the East of England, and the industrial heartland, suggesting that low scores are not confined to one region or one type of community.

The geographic spread of the bottom five is notable. Ipswich, a historic port town in Suffolk, shares the lower tier with post-industrial towns in the West Midlands and East Midlands, while Barking and Dagenham represents a densely populated outer-London borough with a rapidly changing demographic profile. Together they illustrate that social disconnection is not a single-cause phenomenon tied to one kind of place.

The National Conversation and the Independent Commission

The index was designed not as a final verdict but as a conversation starter. It feeds into the National Conversation, a public engagement initiative that has already gathered the views of thousands of British residents on what they perceive as uniting or dividing their communities. Those collected perspectives will inform a report scheduled for publication later this year by the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, a body established specifically to examine what its founders describe as “the converging crises of social disconnection and division” in the United Kingdom.

The commission is co-chaired by Sajid Javid, who served as Conservative home secretary, and Jon Cruddas, formerly Labour’s policy coordinator. Its stated mission is twofold: to build a more rigorous understanding of the country’s current state of social connection and cohesion, and to articulate a shared vision for how communities can live well together. The commission’s first report, published the previous year, carried a foreword warning that “communal life in Britain is under threat,” attributing the erosion to a combination of declining community infrastructure and institutions, weakening family structures, widening economic inequality, eroding public trust in institutions, and what it characterised as chronic neglect by policymakers.

Compounding Threats

Beyond those structural pressures, the commission’s earlier analysis identified additional forces it judged were converting ordinary social disconnection into something more volatile. Among them were what it termed the mismanagement of immigration, persistent cost-of-living pressures, and a wave of social-media-driven extremism that amplifies polarisation. The cumulative effect, in the commission’s own language, is that the UK is “sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division” — a formulation that underscores the urgency with which the body views its mandate.

A Personal Reaction from Cruddas

Jon Cruddas, who represented Dagenham as a Member of Parliament before moving into party policy roles, offered a wry personal response when the bottom-of-the-table result was announced.

“This index is designed to get us talking. And I nearly choked on my cornflakes when my old area came rock bottom. I think government stats miss a lot of what really makes an area tick, including my old town. But that’s why we have developed it, to spark a conversation – because what we really want is your view on your area.”

His remark highlights a tension at the heart of any statistical ranking: official data can capture broad patterns but may overlook the informal networks, local institutions, and everyday solidarities that define a neighbourhood’s actual social texture. The commission’s approach, accordingly, pairs quantitative measurement with qualitative public input, treating the two as complementary rather than substitutable.

What Comes Next

The National Conversation survey remains open to the public until the end of August, inviting residents across England to compare their lived experience with the published data and to contribute their own assessments. The responses will shape the commission’s forthcoming report, which is expected to set out recommendations aimed at rebuilding the connective tissue of local life — from strengthening neighbourhood institutions and family support structures to addressing the economic and informational pressures that the commission identifies as accelerants of division. For the 296 areas now ranked, the index is less a scoreboard than an invitation: a prompt to examine, locally and honestly, what holds a community together and what is quietly pulling it apart.