You’d think as the hometown of the world’s most famous graffiti artist and Europe’s largest street art festival, we’d have this in the bag. But no, despite our streets looking like open-air galleries, Bristol’s only the second best city for street art in the UK. Cue the outrage!
On the hunt for the world’s street art capitals, Betway has been gathering data on cities – including in the UK – to determine the best graffiti hotspots. From brightening our daily commutes to sending strongly-felt political messages, street art is an integral part of Bristol’s personality – it’s for these reasons that make it a number one tourist destination for many graffiti lovers.
With 132 cities analysed, it based its findings on such factors as the number of street art murals; Instagram posts; TikTok posts; articles with city and street art mentions; engagement with said articles (likes, comments, and shares); and average yearly Google searches. You know, all things that tell us the quality of good street art.
London is, of course, the best city for street art in the UK (and it’s also the second best in the world). There’s few categories we can compete with the capital either, but there’s one area that we trounced them – article engagement over 5 years. It seems our hunger for street art articles is unmatched in the UK. With 322,369 engagements, only Paris – the best city worldwide for street art – faired better.
Where else did Bristol do well? Outside of London, we had the highest annual search volume (double that of Belfast in third) and the highest number of IG posts (double that of Manchester and Brighton in fourth and ninth). Given that Bristol also only has 1/18th of the population size of the capital, we also have 214 street art murals compared to London’s 440.
When it comes to quality, we know where Bristol ranks for the best street art anyway… To see the full study head here.
The best cities for street art across the UK
- London
- Bristol
- Belfast
- Manchester
- Sheffield
- Nottingham
- Liverpool
- Birmingham
- Brighton
- Leeds