The short answer
- Greater Manchester has about 380 independent yoga, pilates and dance studios I could find on Google Maps. That's 1.3 per 10,000 residents, or one for every 8,000 people. London has 1.6.
- Trafford (2.6) and Stockport (2.3) have 35% of the studios and 18% of the residents.
- The city of Manchester itself is at 1.1, below the average for the whole area.
- Dance is the biggest group at 41%. In Tameside it's seven in ten.
Studios: Google Maps listings on 29 October 2026, chains and gyms removed. Residents: ONS mid-2025 estimates. How I worked it out is at the end.
In this article
I'm Nik and I make OPEN, booking and payment software for studios. After mapping London I did the same here. OPEN has no UK studios yet, so this comes from public listings, not from our customers. No studio is named, and none is called good or bad.
How many studios each borough has
| Borough | Studios | Per 10,000 residents | One studio per | Yoga | Pilates | Dance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trafford | 62 | 2.6 | 3,900 residents | 34% | 26% | 37% |
| Stockport | 71 | 2.3 | 4,300 residents | 39% | 23% | 32% |
| Bury | 29 | 1.5 | 6,900 residents | 28% | 28% | 45% |
| Bolton | 36 | 1.2 | 8,600 residents | 31% | 17% | 47% |
| Manchester | 67 | 1.1 | 8,800 residents | 46% | 25% | 28% |
| Tameside | 26 | 1.1 | 9,300 residents | 15% | 12% | 69% |
| Oldham | 25 | 1.0 | 10,100 residents | 24% | 20% | 52% |
| Salford | 24 | 0.8 | 12,400 residents | 42% | 17% | 38% |
| Wigan | 25 | 0.7 | 13,900 residents | 24% | 12% | 60% |
| Rochdale | 14 | 0.6 | 17,000 residents | 14% | 36% | 43% |
| Greater Manchester | 379 | 1.3 | 8,000 residents | 34% | 22% | 41% |
The south has the studios
Trafford and Stockport hold more than a third of the area's studios and fewer than a fifth of its people. Trafford has about twice the area's average. Look at the dots and you can see it: a cluster around Altrincham, Hale and Sale, and another round Stockport.
The city of Manchester has nearly as many studios as Stockport but almost twice the residents, so it comes out at 1.1. Residents only tell part of the story there. A studio near the centre lives off people who work nearby, and the map can't see them.
At the other end, Rochdale, Wigan and Salford have 29% of the residents and 17% of the studios. Few studios can be an opening or a sign of less demand. From a list of addresses I can't tell which.
A dance-school region
In London, dance is about a third of the studios. Here it's 41%, the largest group, and in the east and west it's most of the map: Tameside 69%, Wigan 60%, Oldham 52%.
Yoga is a city habit here: 46% of the studios in Manchester and 42% in Salford, against 15% in Tameside. Pilates is the smallest of the three in eight of the ten boroughs, 22% overall against 31% in London. If you teach reformer, that's a question worth a closer look before you sign a lease, in either direction.
A dance school also runs differently from a yoga studio: terms instead of drop-ins, parents instead of adult clients. If that's you, the dance checklist in my post on bookings is the part to read.
How I worked it out
- Studios. Google Maps listings on 29 October 2026, from six searches (yoga studio, pilates studio, reformer pilates, barre, dance school, dance studio) across the ten boroughs and their main districts. Only operating, independent studios count: no chains or franchises (more than five sites), gyms, physios and clinics, council leisure centres, schools and colleges, and no listings with no website and under 15 reviews.
- Treat the numbers as a minimum. Google returns at most 60 results per search and area, and a teacher who rents a hall by the hour usually has no listing. The figures compare boroughs well, but they aren't a census.
- Type of studio. Yoga, pilates, dance or mixed, from the name and Google category. Barre sits with pilates.
- Boroughs. From each studio's postcode, through postcodes.io.
- Residents. ONS mid-year population estimates for mid-2025, Open Government Licence.
- Map. Boundaries from the ONS Open Geography Portal (Local Authority Districts, May 2025), Open Government Licence, contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Each dot is the point on the studio's public listing.
- Every figure combines at least five studios. No studio is named.
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