Is this the laziest place in England?
The Department for Transport today released figures on how many people in England are walking or cycling, raising an important question – what's the laziest place in England?
The answer on this metric is East Lindsey, Lincolnshire, where only 76.7 per cent of people surveyed answered positively.
This means, astonishingly, that nearly a quarter of residents of East Lindsey do no walking or cycling at all over the period of a month – the same is true of nearby South Holland.
A hundred miles west, Stoke on Trent also has an incredibly high proportion of people who seem not to walk or cycle at all – only 79.4 per cent say they do at least once per month.
London performs well, especially in well-heeled areas. Islington, Camden and Richmond are the districts with the highest proportion of people saying they do walk or cycle, with just six per cent or fewer people admitting that they do not walk or cycle in a typical month.
Perhaps the figures will change dramatically once Stoke City Council has sent bizarre all-capitalised text messages to enough people, but we’ll have to wait and find out.
Despite the dire rates of inactivity in East Lindsey and South Holland, the east of England generally is a hotspot for cycling, along with the south-west.
The variation in cycling rates is much wider than activity in general – on average across England, 14.7 per cent of people cycle once a month, but fewer than five per cent do in Oldham.
Cambridge blows the rest of the country out of the water, with an astonishing 57.9 per cent of people cycling at least once a month, the only area where the figure is over 50 per cent.