The least aesthetic areas in the UK are revealed as Walsall and Bexley deemed to be ugly

What makes an area truly aesthetically pleasing? That's exactly what a new study has set out to do which reveals the UK areas that are essentially the ugliest. And you may just live in one of those that ranks bottom

The Global Aesthetic Cities Index by Swift Direct Blinds has included several factors including the amount of listed buildings per 100,000 people, the amount of landmarks per 100,000 people, the number of aesthetic Instagram posts, the number of aesthetic TikToks, and the number of aesthetic-related Google searches to score UK areas on how good they look.

To begin with, the area which ranked second from bottom was Bexley with a score of only 0.95 out of 10 in the study. The south-eastern area of Greater London is part of the London borough of Bexley and was formerly an ancient parish in Kent. It seems the area is lacking in landmarks as only 1 was found among 100,000 residents, and the area doesn't seem to be a favourite on TikTok either.

But below - right at the bottom of the list - was Walsall. This West Midlands town is historically part of Staffordshire and is around 9 miles out of Birmingham The town does have 95-listed buildings, but it seems only a few of these ever make it onto social media. Walsall only had 1 aesthetic Instagram post and no aesthetic TikTok views when researched in this study.

Explaining how the study was conducted, a statement reads: "We used British Listed Buildings to find the number of listed buildings in each UK area. By dividing the total number of listed buildings by each area's population and multiplying this by 100,000, we calculated the number of listed buildings per 100,000 residents.

"We used Tripadvisor to find the number of landmarks in each area (data was collected on 13/09/2023). By dividing the number of landmarks by each area's population and multiplying this by 100,000, we calculated the number of landmarks per 100,000 residents.

"We used Instagram to find the number of posts using the following hashtags: #beautiful(location) and #(location)views.

We used the same hashtags to see each location's number of TikTok views. We added the total number of #beautiful and #view hashtag posts for Instagram and TikTok to find the total aesthetic posts for each location.

"We used Google Ads Keyword Planner to add up the total number of global searches for the following terms between Sept 2022-Aug 2023: 'beautiful + location', 'aesthetic + location', 'location + beautiful', 'location + aesthetic', and 'location + views' (data was collected on 13/09/2023).

"Finally, we used the aesthetic factors (listed buildings/world heritage sites, number of landmarks, Instagram posts, TikTok views, aesthetic-related Google searches) and normalised each element out of 10 before taking an average of those scores to get our overall 'aesthetic score' for each area."

At the other end of the list - ranking top - was Edinburgh with more than 52,000 esthetic Instagram posts and 265,000 aesthetic TikTok views. the city scored 9.05 out of 10 and also had 2,125 listed buildings - far more than any other city or area. Second - with a score of 9 out of 10 -was Liverpool.