Which UK city is the most Christmas-obsessed?
We analysed 361 Christmas searches across 19 UK cities to find out who's googling markets, mince-pie lunches and panto tickets the hardest. Spoiler: Edinburgh wins by a mile, and London comes dead last once you count heads.
Naughty or nice? The headlines
Edinburgh is the UK's Christmas capital
6,750 Christmas searches per 100,000 residents, five times the average. Its Christmas market alone is searched 30,700 times a month.
Nottingham punches way above its weight
Only 5th for total searches but 2nd per person, and the UK's top city per head for Christmas parties and for panto, skating and events.
London: biggest volume, smallest appetite
London racks up the most searches (39,810 a month) but, per person, it's last of all 19 cities, 67% below average.
Scotland is obsessed with Christmas dinner
Inverness (368 per 100k) and Glasgow (226) top the table for Christmas dinner and lunch searches per person.
The UK Christmas map
Big cities always win on raw numbers. Flip to "per person" to see who's really the most festive for their size.
Who's obsessed with what?
Pick any of our 11 Christmas categories to see which cities search for it most per person. The smaller categories have low search numbers, so treat those as a bit of fun.
The festive league table
All 19 cities ranked by Christmas searches per 100,000 residents.
| Rank | City | Searches per 100k | vs average | Total monthly searches | Top Christmas search |
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Your student survival guide to Christmas
Party season cities
Nottingham, Newcastle and Manchester lead for Christmas party searches per person. Book society socials early in those cities.
Market crowds
Edinburgh, Nottingham and Liverpool see the most market searching per head. Expect queues at peak times.
Tree hunters
Bristol and Brighton search for Christmas trees most per person. Halls tree, anyone?
How we checked it twice: methodology
The searches
We built a list of 19 Christmas search patterns, such as "[city] christmas market", "christmas dinner [city]", "christmas party venues [city]", "panto [city]" and "ice skating [city]", and ran each one for 19 cities: 361 keywords in total.
The data
Search volumes are average monthly Google searches in the UK over the latest 12 months, taken from Semrush's UK database in November 2026. Searches with no recorded volume count as zero.
The categories
Each search pattern sits in one category: markets, dinner and lunch, parties, lights and decorations, trees, events (panto, skating and things to do), plus smaller ones for music, shopping, grottos, jumpers and films.
Per-person scores
To compare cities fairly, we divided each city's total by its population to get searches per 100,000 residents. Populations are ONS and National Records of Scotland mid-2024 estimates for each council area (Greater London for London; the Inverness built-up area for Inverness). "vs average" compares each city with the combined rate across all 19 cities.
Things to bear in mind
Searches naming a city come from anyone in the UK, so destination cities attract searches from visitors planning trips, not just residents. Council boundaries are tighter for some cities than others, and "Newport" searches may include other Newports.