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Located on the west coast of Wales, 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 now he has another recommendation that is a little more ambiguous than his name – and it is within the most isolated location in England and Wales.
According to analysis by the Telegraph, homes in the New Quay & Penbryn area are on average 6.8 miles from key amenities, such as major supermarkets, train stations, banks, schools, GPs and pubs.
Its main supermarkets – Tesco and Aldi – are 20 miles down the coast in Cardigan, and the nearest train stations are in Aberystwyth, 40 minutes’ walk up the coast, or in Carmarthen, about an hour south.
New Quay’s status as the most isolated town is closer to Bellingham in Northumberland, where homes were an average of 6.3 miles from main amenities. Although, not surprisingly, Whitechapel in Tower Hamlets in east London is the least isolated area.
For Newquay residents, its remote location means locals don’t have to worry about hours of driving to find a store they like – whether it’s John Lewis, Waitrose or Primark.
Tracy Hay, 52, who owns gift shop Starfish, 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 hard 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, horseback riding and recitation, and one of her older sons, who has an accounting degree, now milks cows on a local farm.
Hay also sometimes travels to Cardiff – twice a 20-minute drive – to shop at John Lewis and Waitrose. “You couldn’t do anything easily because the distances are so big, but then you would feel trapped,” she says.
“You have to be ready to get in the car and drive, even if it’s just for a good workout.”
She says New Quay felt more isolated when she lived here as a teenager. “I left as soon as I could at the age of 18. He felt that there was nothing here.
“Obviously, I wasn’t as isolated in Oxfordshire, but I had a two-hour commute to work, and I was on the 5.28am train every morning. I finally thought – what am I doing?
“Moving here was a great decision for my quality of life. And of course, the New Quay is packed in the summer, so it definitely doesn’t feel isolated there.”
The town has a population of around 1,000, but numbers increase 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 in Cardigan. There is a GP in the town, and a small primary school for 100 children. For secondary school, most children get a bus to Aberaeron – about 20 minutes away – or Newcastle Emlyn, about half an hour’s drive.
Elsewhere, Trinity Hancox, 23, works as a barmaid in the Jitterbug pub, with views over the Irish Sea. “It’s isolated and the jobs are very seasonal. We are always short staffed in the summer.”
She says wages are low and property is very expensive. “There’s no way I can ever buy in New Quay, I’ll end up living in a village outside it, further from the sea. They are much cheaper.”
She also travels long distances to go shopping. “I go to Swansea or Llanelli for Primark, about an hour and a half by car. “And the local cinema is in Cardigan. In the winter, this is a ghost town.”
Another resident, Carla Hogg, 48, says: “The biggest worry is the airport. We have Cardiff, but most flights go from Bristol. So it will only be a three and a half hour drive to get there.
“But we love it here. We use online banking and my husband works from home for a dairy technology firm. We have everything we need.”
Acceptance of the situation in New Quay is evident in the second most isolated place – the quiet village of Bellingham, Northumberland.
Julie Kennedy, manager of The Cheviot Hotel, says locals are used to driving places.
She said: “The nearest train station is Hexham, 35 minutes away, which is also where the supermarkets are.
“We are a small town but self-sufficient. We have a GP, chemist, butcher and a small Co-op. We have a Lloyds mobile bank that comes once a fortnight for the time being.
“The secondary school children 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 facilities and services is linked to additional Telegraph data showing the rate at which rural facilities are closing. Our analysis found that since 2010, food stores have fallen by 12 per cent in urban constituencies. But in rural areas, they have fallen by 28 percent – more than double.
Pubs – once the heart of communities – have declined by 18 per cent in rural constituencies, compared to 11 per cent in urban constituencies over the same period of time. Bank closures are slower in rural areas than in cities – but have fallen by 50 per cent since 2010 (compared to 57 per cent in urban areas).
A recent report by the County Council Network also found that more than one in four bus services had disappeared over the past decade in rural areas, with passenger numbers falling to record levels. This was more than in urban areas.
Brad Taylor, rural transport campaigner from the rural charity CPRE, says: “Buses run hourly, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week to villages in many parts of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
“But in the UK, people in the countryside are isolated by deteriorating public transport links and not being able to access education, work and healthcare.
“Rural buses require much higher levels of investment along with integrated timetables and ticketing systems. Local authorities such as Cornwall are already showing the way forward – now others must follow suit.”
In terms of access to train stations, although homes in England and Wales are on average around 1.7 miles away, this can make a big difference in rural areas. In Bude & Stratton, Cornwall, for example, the average town 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. However, they also face significant challenges in accessing fiber broadband, which offers the highest speeds.
In 2019, Boris Johnson promised “full fiber for all by 2025” as part of his election campaign.
But today, only 58 percent of people in urban areas have access, up from 10 percent in 2019, and only 42 percent in rural areas (up from 12 percent in 2019). At current rates, it will take another seven years for all rural areas to gain access to full fibre.
Rural Wales is once again one of the worst places for Internet. In Cwmisfael, just outside Carmarthen, local Husband Richard, 71, says: “We get seven million bits a second.
“It’s fast compared to what it was 20 years ago. But it’s very slow compared to what you could get in a city or with fiber. “If you try to watch a movie it falls off.
“I paid for fiber broadband at my office for a while, but it cost £60 a month so I stopped.”
In this part of Wales, only 17 per cent of households have superfast broadband. Nationally, 76 percent have access to superfast broadband, which guarantees download speeds of more than 100 Mbit/s, recommended for larger families.
Most of the symptoms depend on the old copper wire service, which struggles at high speeds. A spokesman for the Countryside Alliance said: “There are many reasons why rural areas suffer from slower broadband speeds. A lot of it has to do with the cost.
“Although providers are allowed to subsidize rural connections with the profits they make from urban customers, it is often still uneconomical to lay fiber 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, says: “Although average UK broadband speeds are increasing year on year, not everyone is benefiting.
“We’re seeing a large and widening gap between customers taking advantage of ultrafast speeds and those getting the bare minimum.” Either way, rural areas face significant challenges.
Ben Lake, MP for Ceredigion, said: “Ceredigion is a great place to live. However, living in a rural area is not without its challenges in today’s economic climate.
“The closure of bank branches, lack of proper connectivity, poor transport services, are just a few of the challenges facing rural communities that need urgent attention.
If the UK Government is truly committed to rebalancing, it must prioritize investment in the economic and social infrastructure of rural communities. If this is not done, the gap between urban and rural regions will not widen.”
The research carried out by the Telegraph compared 7,200 geographical areas (High Average Output Tier Areas), which are designed to report small area statistics in England and Wales.
