We all love spending time in our garden. Whether it’s for sunbathing on those few precious British summer days. Gardening to ensure our flower beds look just as pretty as the neighbours. Or even just for enjoying a few evening gins with a sunset. The garden is a little area of escape, where the world of work and worries can’t touch you.

That is, if you’re lucky enough to have your own garden. Recent data by GOV.uk suggests that nearly 1 in 8 families in the UK don’t have access to a private garden and 1 in 12 have no access to green areas at all.

That got us thinking, a garden is an area of happiness for a lot of us. As mentioned above, it can be an area where we can finally relax, blow off steam from work and even be an area we look upon with pride and joy. So, does a garden mean a happier life? And if so, does it mean a bigger garden could make you happier?

Well, we decided to find out. Pulling together a variety of government and Office for National Statistics data, we’ve analysed whether areas, where people own bigger gardens, correlates with a happier life. If you’re a proud garden owner, we think you know the answer already, but find the full results below.

To access the raw data behind this study, find the methodology at the bottom of this article.

The Cities with the Biggest Gardens

To start our study, we first looked at which cities have the biggest gardens. For this, we turned to a recent study conducted by the Office of National Statistics. Analysing UK ordnance data, the study revealed a shocking divide between garden size across the UK.

garden size by city

As you can see in the table, some areas of the UK, such as Chichester, Winchester and St Albans, have huge gardens in the region of 250 to 270 square metres (m2). These cities have private gardens nearly triple the size when compared to cities like Portsmouth (75.4m2) and Kingston-upon-Hull (117.1m2).

The Regions with the Biggest Gardens

Cities can be deceiving. Due to either house building regulations or the general culture of the city, housing and gardens may not be as big due to a variety of factors. With this in mind, we decided it would be best to analyse gardens from a regional perspective.

garden size by region

Unsurprisingly, Scotland is the area of the UK with the largest gardens. With an average garden of 260m2, it must be rather hard work mowing a Scottish lawn. This was closely followed by the South East of England (229m2) and the South West of England (227m2). At the other end of the table, again, this will not be a huge surprise, but you have London at 124m2, the North East of England at 151m2 and the North West of England at 162m2.

Garden x Happiness - City Analysis

OK, so now we have garden size data, we used a correlation analysis to compare whether a bigger garden really did correlate with a happier outlook on life. To do this, we compared data from the government’s Happiness Index. This is a survey completed each year in cities and towns across the UK. Obviously, 2020 wasn’t the happiest of times for the majority of us, so to make it a fair analysis, we took an average score from each city across the last 5 years.

happiness x garden correlation analysis

As you can see in the graph, while there are some cities that don’t follow the trend, on the whole, you do find that cities that offer bigger gardens to their citizens report a happier outlook on life.

Garden X Happiness - Region Analysis

Cities only tell one story. We were also interested to see if the correlation would hold true if we analysed the data by regions of the UK. Well, as you see below, it correlated even more strongly than in our city analysis.

happiness x garden correlation analysis region

As you can see, the data correlates at over 0.91%. While the correlation doesn’t prove that bigger gardens cause happiness, it does strongly suggest that the two factors merit further research and understanding.

Methodology and Raw Data

Thanks for reading our study, we hope you enjoyed it. It was conducted by analysing data from the Office for National Statistics and data from GOV.uk. We then performed a simple correlation analysis to find our results. If you’d like to access the raw data, please follow this link: