Most literary towns in the UK revealed - is yours on the list?

Yorkshire is the capital of romance, according to Amazon

A woman reading a book in Hyde Park (Getty Images)

Yorkshire is the most romantic place in the UK and Cornwall has the best cooks – according to people’s reading lists at least.

The most literary place in the country in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, closely followed by Doncaster and Rochester, according to figures compiled by Amazon.

The website used sales of all books, magazines and newspapers in print and on Kindle e-readers in the last year for every major town and city in the UK for the research.

A closer look at what people were reading revealed that Doncaster was the “city of love” with a penchant for romance novels.

They were also popular in Barnsley and Pontefract, making Yorkshire the UK’s most romantic region as far as books go.

Most books were read per person in Huntingdon, where popular novels in 2013 included Dan Brown’s Inferno, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson.

Residents also purchased more Kindle books per person than anywhere else in the UK.

Truro in Cornwall was the hotspot for cookbooks and Bridgend in Wales showed a fascination with sci-fi literature.

Alex Ferguson’s My Autobiography was perhaps unsurprisingly the best-selling book in Manchester, which came second to Bristol for most books read out of the UK’s largest cities.

For a fourth year running, university city Cambridge topped the list for most books in business, law and finance, and Oxford and Durham also ranked in the category.

The only newcomer in the top 20 literary places was Bridgend, at number 20.

Jorrit Van der Meulen, the vice president of Kindle, said customers were reading “more books than ever before” and the e-reader was increasing the speed at which readers get through volumes.

“Our annual Most Well-Read Towns and Cities list shows that reading continues to be a passion for people up and down the country, and nowhere else more so than in Huntingdon,” he added.

Top 20 most well-read towns and cities (Amazon):

1. Huntingdon

2. Doncaster

3. Rochester

4. Truro

5. Sevenoaks

6. Cambridge

7. Salisbury

8. Chichester

9. Newton Abbot

10. Spalding

11. Bury St Edmunds

12. Dunfermline

13. Chorley

14. Durham

15. Witney

16. Warwick

17. Ashford

18. Canterbury

19. Warrington

20. Bridgend