12 Best Places to Live in The UK if You Hate Crowds

Northumberland has roughly two football pitches of land for every person who lives there, and it's still not the emptiest county on this list. Twelve towns across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland offer that same quiet — with real prices, real hospitals, and one honest catch attached to every single one. In this video, we explore: → Hexham, sitting in a sheltered valley by Hadrian's Wall with a working abbey and a rail line into Newcastle, undone the moment you drive past the Tyne into properly remote upland winters → Sedbergh, England's official Book Town, where the nearest railway station sits ten miles away and buses only run on certain days → Church Stretton, nicknamed Little Switzerland, with its own working train station but no hospital closer than fifteen miles → Louth, home to the tallest parish church spire in the country, in a county with no motorway and no working railway at all → Llandrindod Wells, a Victorian spa town whose population multiplied nearly tenfold once the railway arrived in 1868, though its nearest A&E now sits across the border in Hereford → Rhayader, gateway to the Elan Valley's dark skies and red kites, with one Co-op and nothing else → Cardigan, birthplace of the first National Eisteddfod in 1176, with no train station and prices already down nine percent from their 2023 peak → Dornoch, home to a golf links that shaped one of America's most famous course designers, fifty minutes from the nearest specialist hospital → Grantown-on-Spey, headquarters of the Cairngorms National Park authority, buried under close to 270 millimetres of snow in its heaviest spells → Castle Douglas, Scotland's official Food Town, where passenger trains stopped running in 1965 and never came back → Enniskillen, Northern Ireland's newest hospital town, sitting under more than 1,100 millimetres of rain a year And at number twelve, the sharpest catch on the entire list: a peninsula town wedged between mountains and a lough, home to a saint's traditional resting place, where the railway closed in 1950 and urgent care simply stops at the end of the working day. Subscribe for more of Britain's quietest corners.