Chester has been recently found to be scientifically the ‘most beautiful city in the world’. Apparently, 83.7% of buildings in Chester align with a ‘golden ratio’ ahead of Venice (83.3%), London (83%), Belfast, and Rome at 82%.
This ‘golden ratio’ is known to architects and experts worldwide and is what humans find inherently beautiful in objects.
Jonty Goodchild, Director at Bolton Birch said; “It has long been known there is a science to beauty and it is pleasing to know that our city’s architects have followed design guidelines throughout the centuries so that Chester can scientifically be ‘The World’s most beautiful City’.”
He added; “It’s great news, but although we are the most beautiful City scientifically we still need to appear so to the doubters. This means being picture-perfect and not resting on our laurels. There was another, less well reported, survey carried out by Online Mortgage Advisor which assessed Chester’s popularity on social media in its ‘UK’s Most Photogenic Cities’ survey. We were 20th of the UK’s cities.”
Co-director Martin Dodd also pointed out; “Familiarity with a place often makes us more critical. Chester Civic Trust’s ‘Good, Bad and Ugly Awards 2022 is a good, balanced review of the current state of the city. It highlights areas for praise and areas, buildings and streets which could be even more attractive. Let’s just hope visitors don’t expect too much of Chester now in all its glory and that we keep working together to make it even better!”
This YouTube video explains the ‘Golden Ratio’ and gives other examples of the ratio in use with shells, plants and weather patterns, even astronomy.
The cities ranking was created by Online Mortgage Advisor, who scanned Google Street Views for front-facing photos of hundreds of streets and more than 2,400 buildings in historical cities worldwide. Researchers then plotted points at the corners of each building to calculate the ‘proportion of the longest and shortest lengths of its dimensions’. Those proportions were then compared to the golden ratio (1:1.618) to see how well they matched and the percentage for each city was then calculated to give the rankings. For reasons that can’t really be explained, humans find objects that unfold with this ratio inherently beautiful. Seven UK cities appear in the top ten, including Liverpool in seventh place. The other top 10 beautiful cities are Barcelona (6th), Liverpool, Durham, Bristol, and Oxford (10th). The highest-ranking US city is New York in 17th place with a score of 77.7 percent.
Online Mortgage Advisor’s most photogenic cities ranking is here.
Chester Civic Trust’s Good, Bad and Ugly 2022 is reported here and here.