London - From the shimmering waters of the Lake District to the rugged drama of the Cornish coastline, Britain has a wealth of beautiful places that lift the spirit.
Now scientists have found that living in a scenic area is also good for your body – as it actually makes you feel healthier.
The team from Warwick Business School came to this conclusion using ratings from a website called Scenic-Or-Not, where users judged how pretty more than 212 000 pictures of Britain were.
The researchers took the average rating of each area, and then analysed how healthy people from that area reported themselves to be in the 2011 census.
They discovered that those who lived in the most beautiful areas reported better health.
However, the experts found that scenic places were not simply green areas – but could equally be mountains, lakes or coastline.
For example, among the most highly rated was Loch Etive, a sea loch in Argyll and Bute in Scotland.
Among the least scenic places were the Bradley Hall Lane trading estate in Standish, near Wigan, and the Channel Tunnel entrance in Kent.
Chanuki Seresinhe, a PhD student of the School’s Data Science Lab, said: “Just because a place is green does not compel us to feel better on its own. It seems to be that the beauty of the environment, as measured by scenicness, is of crucial importance. Very scenic photos also tend to contain large proportions of grey, brown and blue – perhaps corresponding to mountains or lakes.”
Daily Mail