New figures have revealed the best and worst places in the UK to enjoy one of life’s most simple pleasures – a bubble bath.
The findings compiled by Harvey Water Softeners link to new figures showcasing the hard water levels for towns and cities across the UK.
With the lowest reading in the UK of 23 milligrams of calcium carbonate per litre – the metric used to measure the severity of hard water – the Scottish capital of Edinburgh was deemed to be the best place for bubbles followed by Plymouth (25mg/l) and Glasgow (28mg/l). Ipswich was deemed to be the worst place for a soak due to having the highest concentration (368mg/l) closely followed by Hull (358mg/l) and Stevenage (356mg/l).
The Isle of Wight falls into the worst 25 places in the country for a bath, with 248mg/l, meaning the water across the island is deemed as aggressively hard.
Softer water contains fewer minerals allowing products such as bubble bath, soap and shampoo to lather better meaning you can create bigger bubbles more easily. With fewer products, it’s cheaper too.
As well as being closely linked to the quality of a bubble bath, these figures also highlight the areas most at risk to dry skin and hair, damage to household appliances as well as other things such as poor water pressure in showers and the need to use more detergent when washing clothes.
The full rankings are as follows:
| Location | Water Level (mg/l) | ||
| Edinburgh | 23 | Chelmsford | 261 |
| Plymouth | 25 | Bath | 267 |
| Glasgow | 28 | Exeter | 268 |
| Manchester | 30 | Bournemouth | 270 |
| Birmingham | 44 | London | 274 |
| Sheffield | 45 | Grantham | 278 |
| Cardiff | 60 | Brighton | 279 |
| Liverpool | 65 | Portsmouth | 301 |
| Middlesbrough | 80 | Oxford | 302 |
| Stoke | 96 | Northampton | 304 |
| Newcastle | 130 | Bedford | 305 |
| Derby | 132 | Milton Keynes | 312 |
| Coventry | 141 | Basingstoke | 320 |
| Gloucester | 172 | Norwich | 321 |
| Nottingham | 189 | Cambridge | 322 |
| Bristol | 194 | Winchester | 326 |
| Leicester | 201 | Reading | 338 |
| York | 240 | Luton | 342 |
| Peterborough | 247 | Stevenage | 356 |
| Isle of Wight | 248 | Hull | 358 |
| Lincoln | 255 | Ipswich | 368 |
No mention of the bone health benefits of a higher calcium carbonate content in water. It’s not all about soft, soft, soft. Give us the hard facts too.
Well now, that’s ruined my day!… not..
The water on the isle of wight is disgusting you get like a scum on the top of your hot drinks and the kettle needs descaling constantly
Not with a water softener – no more kettle descaling, scum in you drinks and the bonus is there is a lot less cleaning too! I would not be without my softener.
If you would like to see how our softener will help you achieve a total
Treatment for your home and health email me on
[email protected] and arrange your own personal demonstration, you’ll be astounded with the results!
Why are you trying to dum up business based on inaccurate assertions about health benefits of soft water? It simply is not true
Shouldn’t this article be clearly marked as an advertisement if you are allowing people to peddle their wares??
Well you know what you can do.
i certainly agree with that and another thing ive noticed since moving to the iow is that my nails are harder maybe that’s a link
Go to shanklin when the strorm drains are in flow plenty of bubbles then. All the house conversions into flats and all the bath and shower waste are fitted to rain hoppers and down pipes. Not the sewers.
Your talking twaddle, my man. Check out https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3775162/
I think you will find softening water is potentially seriously bad for your health, and that the bioavailability of both calcium and magnesium in hard water are good for you.
I don’t think that’s a good paper to use. It explicitly states that there is insufficient evidence to show causality, and it’s little more than a bunch of summaries of other papers without much comment on the quality of the data – beyond noting the very poor quality of data in one of the studies [Fedrick J, 1970]; and then proceeds to use it to support their conclusions.Other reviews such as https://doi.org/10.1097/HJR.0b013e3282f15fce or https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.0900782 don’t appear to support the conclusions from your link around cardiovascular disease or stroke.
Just because you don’t like my comment, deleting it only goes to show you’re wrong
I’m not bothered
We are in the top 20