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Located on the west coast of Wales, the popular seaside resort of New Quay is best known for its sandy beaches, connections to Dylan Thomas and the pod of bottlenose dolphins in Cardigan Bay.
But it now has another, slightly more ambivalent honor to its name: it is the most remote location in England and Wales.
According to an analysis by the Telegraph, homes in the New Quay and Penbryn area are on average seven miles from key amenities such as major supermarkets, train stations, banks, schools, GPs and pubs.
The main supermarkets – Tesco and Aldi – are 20 miles up the coast in Cardigan, while the nearest train stations are at Aberystwyth, a 40-minute drive up the coast, or at Carmarthen, about an hour’s drive south.
New Quay’s status as the most remote town is most closely matched by Bellingham in Northumberland, where houses were on average 6 miles from main services. While the least surprising area is Whitechapel in Tower Hamlets in East London.
For residents of New Quay, their isolated location means that some locals have no qualms about having to drive for hours to find a store they like – be it John Lewis, Waitrose or Primark.
Tracy Hay, 52, owner of the Starfish gift shop, grew up in the area and then moved to Oxfordshire to work in banking before returning home. She says: “Of course it is isolated. It’s a 40 mile trip just to get food. And especially in the summer it is difficult to get a delivery time.”
Hay previously worked for JP Morgan in Canary Wharf and commuted from Charlbury, in the Cotswolds. And she says living in New Quay is a very different lifestyle.
Much of the rural area outside the city has no cell phone signal, she explains.
She also drives 40 minutes to take her eight-year-old daughter for after-school activities such as shooting, horse riding and reciting, while one of her older sons, who has an accounting degree, now milks cows on a local farm.
Occasionally Hay also travels to Cardiff – a two hour and 20 minute drive – to shop at John Lewis and Waitrose. “You could easily do nothing because the distances are so great, but then you feel trapped,” she says.
“You have to be willing to get in the car and drive, even if it’s just to a good gym.”
She says New Quay felt more isolated when she lived here as a teenager. “I left as soon as I could at 18 years old. It felt like there was nothing here.
“Obviously I was less isolated in Oxfordshire, but I had a two-hour commute and was on the train at 5.28am every morning. Finally I thought, what am I doing?
“Moving here was a great decision for my quality of life. And of course New Quay gets rammed in the summer, so it certainly doesn’t feel isolated.”
The town has about 1,000 inhabitants, but the number increases in the summer when tourists come.
There is a local grocery store – a small Costcutter – and the Post Office offers some banking services, with the main branches of HSBC and Lloyds in Cardigan. There is a general practitioner in the town and a small primary school for 100 children. For secondary school, most children take a bus to Aberaeron – about 20 minutes away – or Newcastle Emlyn, about half an hour away.
Another local resident, Trinity Hancox, 23, works as a barmaid at the Jitterbug pub, overlooking the Irish Sea. “It’s isolated and the jobs are very seasonal. We always have too few staff in the summer.”
She says wages are low and properties are very expensive. “There is no way I can ever buy in New Quay, I will end up living in a village out there, further from the sea. They are a lot cheaper.”
She also travels long distances for shopping. “For Primark I go to Swansea or Llanelli, both about an hour and a half away by car. ‘And the local cinema is in Cardigan. In the winter this is a ghost town.”
Another resident, Carla Hogg, 48, added: “The most annoying part is the airport. We have Cardiff, but most flights are from Bristol. So it’s 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 company. We have everything we need.”
The acceptance of the situation in New Quay is echoed in the second most remote place: the quiet village of Bellingham, Northumberland.
Julie Kennedy, manager of The Cheviot Hotel, says locals are getting used to driving.
She says: “The nearest train station is Hexham, 35 minutes away, and that’s where the supermarkets are too.
“We are a small town, but self-sufficient. We have a doctor, pharmacy, butcher and small cooperative. We have a mobile Lloyds bank that visits once every fortnight for the time being.
“The secondary school students have to take the bus 50 minutes to Haydon Bridge, but you get used to that. The internet is great and it is a beautiful place to live.”
The lack of facilities and services is related to additional data from the Telegraaf, which shows the extent to which national facilities are closing. Our analysis found that food shops in urban constituencies have fallen by 12 per cent since 2010. But in rural areas they have plummeted by 28 percent – more than double.
Pubs – once the lifeblood of communities – have fallen by 18 per cent in rural constituencies, compared to 11 per cent in urban constituencies over the same period. Banks have closed more slowly in rural areas than in cities – but they are still down 50 percent since 2010 (compared to 57 percent in more urban areas).
A recent report from the County Councils Network also found that more than one in four bus services in rural areas have disappeared in the past decade, with passenger numbers falling to record lows. This was more than in urban areas.
Brad Taylor, rural transport campaigner at rural transport charity CPRE, said: “Villages in many parts of Germany, Austria and Switzerland are served by buses every hour, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
“But in Britain, poor and deteriorating public transport links have left people in rural areas isolated and unable to access education, work and healthcare.
“Rural buses urgently need much higher levels of investment, as well as integrated timetables and ticketing systems. Local authorities such as Cornwall are already showing the way forward in this area – others must now follow suit.”
In terms of access to train stations, while houses in England and Wales are on average around 1.7 miles away, this can vary enormously in rural areas. In Bude & Stratton, Cornwall, for example, the average house is 37 miles from a station.
The decline of services such as banks and shops has left many rural communities more dependent on the internet than those in urban areas. Yet they also face significant challenges in accessing fiber broadband, which offers the fastest speeds.
In 2019, Boris Johnson promised “full fiber provision for all by 2025” as part of his election campaign.
Yet only 58 percent of people in urban areas have access, down from 10 percent in 2019, and only 42 percent in rural areas (down from 12 percent in 2019). At the current rate, it will take another seven years before all rural areas gain access to full fiber.
Once again, one of the worst places for internet is rural Wales. In Cwmisfael, just outside Carmarthen, 71-year-old Richard Husband says: “We’re getting seven million bits per second.
“It’s fast compared to twenty years ago. But it’s very slow compared to what you could get in a city or with fiber. “When you try to watch a movie, it cuts out.
“I paid for fiber broadband at my office for a while, but it was £60 a month so I stopped.”
In this part of Wales, only 17 percent of households have superfast broadband. Nationally, 76 percent have access to superfast broadband, guaranteeing download speeds of over 100 Mbit/s, recommended for larger households.
Most properties rely on the old copper wire service, which struggles with high speeds. A spokesperson for the Countryside Alliance said: “There are several reasons why rural areas suffer from slower broadband speeds. A large part of this has to do with costs.
“Although providers may subsidize rural connections with the profits they make from urban customers, it is still often uneconomic to install 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, added: “Although the average UK broadband speed is increasing year on year, not everyone is benefiting.
“We see a large and growing divide between customers who benefit from ultra-fast speeds and those who get the bare minimum.” Regardless, rural areas face major challenges.
Ben Lake, MP for Ceredigion, said: “Ceredigion is a beautiful place to live. However, living in a rural area is not without challenges in the current economic climate.
“The closure of bank branches, lack of proper connectivity, poor transport services, to name a few challenges faced by rural communities that require urgent attention.
If the UK Government really wants to move to the next level, it must prioritize investment in the economic and social infrastructure of rural communities. If we don’t do that, the gap between urban and rural regions will only widen.”
The Telegraph’s research compared 7,200 geographical areas (Middle Layer Super Output Areas), which are designed to enable the reporting of statistics on small areas in England and Wales.