Why branding Hastings 'the Grinch capital of the UK' is just plain poverty shaming

Last week, the seaside town of Hastings was branded ‘the Grinch capital of the UK’, after it was revealed that the town had fewer Christmas-related online searches per 100,000 people than anywhere else in the country.

This dubious honour came courtesy of a Singapore-based SEO company, via the kind of press release that always does the rounds at this time of year and generally gets given column inches as local journalists rush to fill the Christmas editions of their papers. I speak as a former local journo who once ran a story when a town in my patch was declared the ‘least kinky’ based on… something or other.

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When Luton was crowned the UK’s ‘least Christmassy town’ last year, the locals came out fighting, with Luton Today giving them a platform to object to the story, which was carried in a diverse range of national publications from Time Out to the Daily Express to LadBible. 

But while being the ‘least Christmassy’ town is one thing, being labeled a ‘Grinch’ town gives the whole thing an altogether meaner, nastier tone. 

In the original Dr Suess book, the Grinch is a hateful, vengeful creature that sets out to destroy Christmas for the joyful Whos of Whoville for the sheer hell of it. To imply that those living in Hastings are not frantically searching for expensive Christmas gifts or overpriced festive days out because they just want to burn Christmas to the ground is grossly unfair. In fact, it is plain poverty shaming.

Let’s break down why the good people of Hastings may not be feeling the Christmas spirit this year.

Earlier this year, a report by the Sussex Community Foundation showed that Hastings was performing poorly across all seven key deprivation measures, which include income, employment, education and training, health and disability, crime, housing and living environment. The town has the highest multiple deprivation score (34.15) in Sussex and the highest percentage of income-deprived residents (20.1%).

Hastings is also home to a high percentage of disabled people – 21.7% compared to 16.9% nationally – and a large proportion of people with premature disabilities, as 14.7% of those under 65 are classed as disabled under the Equality Act. This in turn contributes to the town’s high rates of unemployment.

It’s not just Hastings that has been unfairly labelled a ‘Grinch town’. Also present in the top 10 is Nottingham, one of the 20 local authorities with the highest child poverty rates in 2021/22, according to Action for Children, and Rotherham, which ranks as the 35th most deprived upper-tier local authority in England, with 35% of Rotherham’s neighbourhoods in the 20% most deprived in England. 

Even leafy Oxford, which is not often the first place to spring to mind when talking about deprivation, had 26% of children living below the poverty line according to data from the 2021 Census.

I don’t expect an SEO company on the other side of the world to really give two hoots about the deprivation levels in these so-called ‘Grinch’ towns. But this is something that the local media should be calling out in an opinion piece, or giving local residents a chance to challenge this idea, or at least giving some contextual information as to what may be behind these stats. Kudos to Hastings Online Times for delving into the company’s methodology which may have been flawed to begin with.

But this is less about the firm’s methodology and more about the careless language used. To brand a socially and economically deprived town ‘the Grinch capital’ just because its residents are not frantically searching Christmas-related terms is pure poverty shaming. People who may not be able to afford to give their family the Christmas they would like are being given the message that they, much like the Grinch, are spoiling the festive season for those around them.

Local media should be calling out this bullshit more. They have a responsibility to their readers, rather than some publicity-hungry faceless corporation some 7,000 miles away.

Laura Cooke is a freelance journalist.

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