The South East's 10 Highest-Crime Towns (It's Not Where You'd Think)

Which towns in the South East record the most crime? Not the ones you'd guess. We took every crime police.uk recorded from September 2025 to August 2026, in the South East region as defined by the ONS (so not London or Essex), and ranked the towns of 20,000 to 100,000 people by crimes per 1,000 residents. Big cities like Brighton, Southampton, Portsmouth, Reading, Oxford and Milton Keynes are too big for this list. The twist: crime is recorded where it happens, but divided by the people who live there. So cathedral cities and busy shopping towns rise to the top. A crime rate measures what happens in a place, not the people who live there. Watch next: The 10 Poorest Towns in England. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:11 How we ranked them 1:15 #10 Chatham 2:02 #9 Folkestone 2:39 #8 Havant 3:18 #7 Ramsgate 4:09 #6 Eastbourne 4:51 #5 Hastings 5:43 #4 Newport 6:23 #3 Dover 7:02 #2 Chichester 8:03 #1 Canterbury 8:56 What the ten have in common Method: police.uk street-level crime, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026, anti-social behaviour excluded; crimes per 1,000 residents (Census 2021) by neighbourhood, grouped into ONS Built-up Areas 2022 of 20,000 to 100,000 people in the ONS South East region. Trends are our own year-on-year comparison; police.uk figures are revised over time and locations are approximate. Next: English towns older than America. Shire & Stone: the stories behind Britain's villages, towns and cities. Subscribe for a new place every week. CREDITS Photos: Wikimedia Commons contributors. CC BY-SA 3.0: Diliff, Diliff, Papa Lima Whiskey (edit), Kreepin Deth, Arriva436 | CC BY-SA 4.0: Photograph by Clem Rutter, Rochester, Kent. (www.clemrutter., Nilfanion, Partonez, Hsq7278, Digihum, Immanuel Giel, ITookSomePhotos, No Swan So Fine, Tilman2007, Chensiyuan, Simon Burchell, ECetc Church Photos, Phil Pead | CC BY 2.5: Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent | CC BY-SA 2.0: Chris Whippet, Dr Neil Clifton, Ben Brooksbank, Stephen McKay, Helmut Zozmann, Robert Lamb, David Boness, Paul Gillett, Tom Page, Christopher Hilton, Oast House Archive, Mat Fascione, Ian S, Peter Trimming, Michael Garlick, Colin Park, Len Williams | CC BY 2.0: Tim Sheerman-Chase, JackPeasePhotography, Ray in Manila, John Fielding from Norwich, UK, Wikimedia Commons contributor | Thumbnail photo: Peter S, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Canterbury Cathedral, geograph.org.uk 8018782) Satellite imagery: Google, Imagery ©2026 Airbus, CNES / Airbus, Landsat / Copernicus, Maxar Technologies. Music: original score made for this video. Narration: AI voice (Gemini TTS). #England #BritishTowns #ShireAndStone