Southend has been named the 8th most ‘zen’ city or town in the UK.

SupplementPlace has put together the ranking after using data to find how 50 of the UK’s highest populated places rank for quality of life factors such as happiness, life satisfaction and anxiety.

It found that one key factors to residents feeling zen – or relaxed – was how close they lived to the coast.

Southend was one of a number of coastal areas placed inside the top 10, with Bournemouth coming top.

Southend achieved an overall rating of 6.01 out of 10.

Supplement Place used other methods to come up its rankings, such as checking annual Google searches for keywords which relate to the ideas of peacefulness, calm, and “zen”.

The keywords used were “green spaces”, “meditation”, “parks near me”, and “yoga”.

A spokesman added: “Once we had the figures for each of these search terms, we divided the search volumes by the populations of each city to give a proportionate score.

“Finally, we gave each town and city a normalised score out of ten for each factor, before taking an average score across all of the factors.

“This allowed us to produce an overall ranking and crown one location as the UK’s zen capital.”

With its coastal location and green parks, it’s no surprise to see Southend ranking highly in the most relaxed places in the UK.

It pipped a number of other big places in the rankings, such as York, Leicester, Newcastle and Liverpool.