Why so sad, Wirral?

New figures put New Brighton among the neighbourhoods with the highest recorded rates of depression in England. We've spent years putting colour back on these streets. Now we want to know, honestly, whether any of it has made people feel better. So we're going out to ask.

One in four.

That's the number I haven't been able to put down this week. Roughly one in four adults in New Brighton has a depression diagnosis on their GP record.

Not a hunch. Not a guess. The House of Commons Library took GP data from across England, worked out where the patients actually live, and published the results neighbourhood by neighbourhood. This month the papers picked it up, and the Wirral was all over it.

Birkenhead has the highest rate of any parliamentary constituency in England: an estimated 25.2% of adults. Wallasey, our constituency, is third. And of the ten neighbourhoods in the whole country with the highest rates, seven are on the Wirral.

I've read a lot of reports about this peninsula over the years. This one landed differently. It knocked the wind out of me. It's upsetting to read, and it should be.

Then I went looking for us.

The New Brighton neighbourhood sits at 24.8%. Out of 6,856 neighbourhoods in England, that puts us 37th. The England average is 14.3%.

And here's the part that hasn't made the headlines. Every single one of the Wirral's 42 neighbourhoods is above that average. Every one. Even Caldy and Newton, about as leafy as this peninsula gets, comes in at 16.2%. This isn't a Birkenhead problem, or a Wallasey problem. It's a Wirral one.

Before anyone shares that number, a word on what it is and what it isn't.

These are modelled estimates, not a headcount. They count people who have been diagnosed by a GP, which is not the same as counting everyone who is struggling. A diagnosis means someone walked into a surgery and asked for help, and that takes courage. Some of the people having the hardest time will never show up in a figure like this at all.

So I'm not going to pretend this measures the mood of the town. But I'm not going to pretend it's nothing, either. One in four is a lot of our neighbours. It's someone on your street. It's probably someone you love.

For the better part of a decade, a lot of people here have been working on the one thing we could actually get our hands on. The place itself.

This seafront lost its tower, its ballroom and its bathing pool over the course of the last century, and every time something went, it was cheaper to clear the site than to bring it back. By 2018, half the businesses on Victoria Road had their shutters down. That's what managed decline looks like from street level. Nobody announces it. You just notice, one year, that there's less.

We decided not to accept that.

Colour on blank gable ends. Artists of international standing painting a seaside town in the rain. Nearly forty large-scale works now in the OpenAIR Gallery, in New Brighton's Victoria Quarter, around Victoria Road and Union Terrace. Free. Outdoors. Open to everybody, whatever kind of day they're having.

And more and more, those walls tell our own stories. Captain Mike Lowe, painted by BREZAUX at the Master Mariner, the first of our Local Heroes. Cain, Wirral's most photographed dog, with his ashes mixed into the paint and a bench in Vale Park for anyone who has lost someone. Kenny Dunn, who has kept these streets clean for more than ten years, painted by Dotmasters as the first piece in his Unsung Heroes series. None of that was organised from the top. It came from the town.

We've always believed that where you live gets into how you feel. That a street somebody has clearly cared for tells the people walking down it that they're worth caring for too. It's why we keep saying it. Creativity isn't decoration. It's infrastructure.

Which leaves the question I can't stop asking.

Has any of it helped?

The data can't tell us. I tried.

The Commons Library published the same kind of figures for 2019/20, so I put the two years side by side. Back then, New Brighton was at 19.7%. It has risen since, like almost everywhere: across England the rate went up by nearly a quarter. New Brighton's rise was a little smaller than next door in Liscard, Egremont and Seacombe.

It would be very easy to write a headline off the back of that. I'm not going to.

The gap is small. The murals were already going up by 2019, so there's no clean before and after. And one GP surgery changing how it records things can move a neighbourhood's figure by more than that difference. A spreadsheet can't tell you whether a wall made somebody's walk to work a bit lighter.

People can.

So we're going to ask them.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be out on the streets of New Brighton with a recorder and a notebook. Victoria Road. The promenade. Outside the shops, down by the Marine Lake, wherever people are.

We want to hear how this place makes you feel. Whether you've noticed a change, or whether the colour, the stories and the new businesses have passed you by completely. Where you go when you need to feel better. What's missing. What would make a difference.

We want the honest answers, not the flattering ones. If someone tells us a mural means nothing when you're worried about the rent, that goes in too. Community-led regeneration only means something if the community gets to mark the homework.

And we'll do it carefully. Nobody has to take part, and you can stop whenever you like. We won't ask anyone about their health, a diagnosis or their medical history. We're artists and neighbours, not clinicians. You can stay anonymous: we'll only use your name, your voice or your face if you tell us we can, and you can change your mind later. Anything we record is looked after under our published privacy policy. And we'll ask everyone the same few simple questions, so we can come back next year and see whether anything has shifted.

Then we'll publish what we find. The good and the uncomfortable.

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If today is a hard day, you don't need to wait for us to turn up with a microphone. Samaritans are there day or night, free, on 116 123.

If you need urgent help with your mental health, call NHS 111 and choose the mental health option. If you're 16 or over and registered with a Wirral GP, you can refer yourself to NHS Wirral Talking Therapies on 0151 649 1859. And if anyone's life is at risk, call 999.

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One in four is a hard number to read about your own town.

But it's also a reason. Not to despair. Not to paint over it. To get out there, stand on the corner, sit on the bench, and listen.

If you see us, stop and talk to us. Or drop into Rockpoint Records on Victoria Road and tell us where to find you.

We've spent years asking what this town could look like.

Now we're asking how it feels.

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About the figures: House of Commons Library, Constituency data: Health conditions (2026), modelled from NHS England Quality and Outcomes Framework data for 2024/25. Figures are estimated shares of adults aged 18 and over with a depression diagnosis recorded by their GP. "Neighbourhoods" are the Commons Library's named versions of the ONS's Middle Layer Super Output Areas, each home to between 5,000 and 15,000 people. The 2019/20 comparison uses the Library's earlier release of the same analysis.