Nearly three in ten British households now contain one person. A market has grown up in the gap, and at its far end sits a trade nobody licenses and nobody counts.
In early 2020, Wellcome Collection and BBC Radio 4 ran the largest study of touch ever attempted. Nearly 40,000 people across 112 countries answered a survey designed by Michael Banissy, then at Goldsmiths. The finding that travelled furthest was this: 43 per cent of respondents felt that society does not let us touch each other enough. It was the single most common response in the study. South America was the only region where the most common answer was that society does let us touch enough.
Two caveats, because they matter. This was a self-selected sample recruited through a Radio 4 broadcast, so it over-recruits people who already care about the subject. And it measures how people feel about touch at one moment, not how much touch they get compared with twenty years ago. There is no British dataset showing that physical contact has measurably declined. Anyone who tells you there is has not looked.
What we do have is a structural number, and it is a better one.
Three in ten
The Office for National Statistics counted 8.4 million people living alone in the UK in 2024, up from 7.6 million a decade earlier. That is 29.5 per cent of all households containing exactly one person. More than half of those living alone are now 65 or over, up from 45.5 per cent in 2014.
You do not need a survey to work out what that does to the amount of incidental physical contact a life contains. Nobody brushes past you in a hallway you have to yourself.
Loneliness, though, does not behave the way the headlines suggest. The Community Life Survey found 6.6 per cent of adults in England felt lonely often or always in 2024/25, down from 7.1 per cent the year before. It sat at around 5 per cent through the 2010s, so it is elevated, but it is currently falling rather than climbing. The Health Survey for England put the peak rate not among pensioners but among 25 to 34 year olds, at 9 per cent. Sixteen to 24 year olds came in at 4.
So the tidy story, that Britain is getting lonelier and lonelier and therefore buying company, is not what the numbers say. Something more specific is happening.
What touch actually does
In April 2024, Julian Packheiser and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour covering 137 studies and 12,966 people. It remains the most serious attempt to establish what touch interventions do to health.
For adults, the average effect was medium sized, a Hedges’ g of 0.52. The biggest gains were on pain, state anxiety and depression. Human touch beat touch from an object or a robot for mental health, though for physical outcomes the source made little difference. A massage chair works on your back. It does not work on your mood.
Two findings from that paper deserve more attention than they got.
The first is about frequency. More sessions improved outcomes. Longer sessions did not. Frequent and short beats rare and long, which is precisely the opposite of how the wellness industry prices its product.
The second is the one that explains the entire market this piece is about. In adults, touch from a familiar person and touch from a healthcare professional produced no significant difference in benefit. In newborns, parental touch clearly outperformed touch from a stranger. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood, the identity of the person touching you stops mattering very much to your nervous system.
The underlying biology is not mystical. In 2009, Line Löken and colleagues showed in Nature Neuroscience that a class of unmyelinated nerve fibres, C-tactile afferents, fire hardest when skin is stroked at between one and ten centimetres per second, and that those are exactly the speeds people rate as most pleasant. Roughly the speed of a caress. It is a separate channel from the one that tells you what you are holding. What it is not is a hug hormone, and the popular oxytocin story around all this is considerably shakier than the confidence with which it gets repeated.
The market that grew in the gap
IBISWorld counted 3,651 health and wellness spa businesses in the UK in 2025, up from 3,487 the year before, and growing at a compound 9.2 per cent since 2020. Global Market Insights put massage therapy at $1.9 billion, the largest single service segment in the UK spa market. These are commercial research house figures rather than official statistics, and the forecasts in particular should be read as sales material, but the direction is consistent.
At the softer end of the same market is professional cuddling, which arrived in Britain in July 2016 when Kitty Mansfield opened BeCuddled in southwest London and Vice reported it as the country’s first agency of its kind. The Classic Snuggle cost £50 an hour. Dawn Til Dusk cost £450. There is now a UK training and certification body for practitioners.
How many professional cuddlers work in Britain, and what the sector is worth, nobody knows. No figure exists. The body that certifies them does not publish practitioner numbers, and no researcher has counted. That absence is more revealing than any estimate would be.
Where the research does exist, it is good. Last year Joseph Honeycutt and Leah LeFebvre published interviews with fifteen professional cuddle practitioners in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Their subjects had between ten months and ten years in the work, and the paper is largely about how they manufacture and hold the boundary that keeps the service non-sexual. The authors identify four escalating categories of breach: disquietude, overstimulation, transference, and severe breaches. Transference. A category of professional risk borrowed straight from psychotherapy, appearing in a trade that has no regulator at all.
London licenses this. Manchester does not.
Here is the thing almost nobody knows about the paid-touch economy in Britain: whether it is regulated depends entirely on where you stand.
London has licensed massage premises since the London County Council (General Powers) Act 1920. The modern version, Part II of the London Local Authorities Act 1991, requires a special treatment licence for any premises offering massage, along with manicure, acupuncture, tattooing, piercing, chiropody and vapour baths. Most London boroughs run the register, and the City of London still runs its own under the 1920 Act.
Manchester, on its own published licensing pages and public registers, runs no equivalent. The city licenses alcohol, taxis, street trading, gambling, scrap metal dealers, houses in multiple occupation and sex establishments, which in Manchester means sexual entertainment venues, sex shops and sex cinemas. It registers tattooing, acupuncture, piercing and electrolysis under separate 1982 legislation. Massage appears nowhere. It is not statutorily regulated at national level either, unlike physiotherapy or nursing, so oversight falls to voluntary membership bodies that a business is free not to join.
Nor does anyone know how large the sector is. In 2021, a University of Bristol team led by Marianne Hester published the most rigorous recent overview of prostitution and sex work in England and Wales, built a typology of thirteen distinct settings and services, and stated flatly that they could not present the data in simple numerical terms. When the people who study this for a living decline to give you a number, be suspicious of anyone who does.
What sits at the far end of that unregulated market is the adult side of it, and in Manchester some of it is considerably older than the wellness boom now growing around it. In Northenden, ten minutes from the airport, one of Manchester’s longest-running massage parlours has been trading since 1984. It predates the Touch Test by thirty-six years, the meta-analysis by forty, and the entire British cuddle-therapy sector by thirty-two.
Which is the uncomfortable point. The research now says that for an adult, paid touch from a professional does roughly as much good as touch from someone who loves you. Britain has been quietly acting on that finding for decades, in premises most councils do not license and no one has ever counted. The wellness industry did not discover the touch deficit. It just found a respectable way to charge for it.
