The Other Koreatowns: Six UK Cities Building Their Own Slice of Seoul

Ask anyone in Britain where the Korean community lives and you'll get the same answer: New Malden. Fair enough. The south-west London suburb has anchored Korean life in the UK for decades, and its barbecue restaurants, bakeries and late-night groceries still set the standard. But New Malden has also become a victim of its own reputation. Rents are steep, Saturday parking is a contact sport, and if you live in Leeds, Glasgow or Cardiff, a trip to KT3 costs you a train fare and most of your weekend.

So people have stopped waiting for London. Over the past few years a handful of regional cities have grown their own Korean clusters — not tourist-board Koreatowns with ceremonial gates and a gift shop, but working neighbourhoods built around a grocer, a restaurant and a university population. Below is what's actually there, honestly appraised.

Manchester: the Oxford Road corridor

Manchester's Korean gravity runs along the Oxford Road corridor, spilling towards Rusholme and the fringes of both universities. There's no plaque and no banner, so you have to know what you're looking at: walk ten minutes from a students' union and you'll pass groceries stacked three brands deep in gochujang, a fried chicken place that fills up after eight, and restaurants where the menu says jjigae rather than 'Asian fusion'. Two universities and a large international cohort do the heavy lifting, which means the scene behaves like a weekday city rather than a weekend one. Book a Saturday lunch, then do your grocery run before the shelves get picked over.

Birmingham: dispersed, and better for it

Birmingham's Korean footprint is spread out, and that's part of the charm. Kitchens cluster around the fringes of the centre and out towards Edgbaston and Selly Oak, where the university pulls in a steady Korean student crowd. The groceries are smaller than London's but surprisingly deep — frozen dumplings, rice cakes, decent kimchi, the sesame oil worth paying for. Church communities and student societies act as informal noticeboards here, which is why supper clubs and pop-ups tend to surface in the Midlands before anywhere else outside the capital. Come by car if you can and treat it as a crawl: the good stuff sits across a couple of postcodes.

Glasgow: central, compact, gig-friendly

Glasgow's Korean food scene clusters tightly around the centre, within a short walk of Central Station — genuinely useful when your train home leaves at nine. Barbecue and fried chicken have made the biggest inroads, with a growing bakery-and-café layer aimed at Strathclyde and Glasgow Uni students. The city's real advantage is infrastructure: the Hydro and the SEC pull arena-scale tours that used to be London-only, so a gig ticket no longer means a five-in-the-morning coach. Watch for cup-sleeve cafés and small events advertised through Korean societies and dance-cover groups. And bring a coat; the queue outside a fried chicken shop in November is its own endurance event.

Leeds: the north's most organised pocket

Leeds has quietly become the best-drilled Korean scene outside London. The streets between Vicar Lane and the Merrion Centre hold a cluster of Asian groceries whose Korean shelves have expanded year on year, and fried chicken has colonised the casual end of the city centre. What makes Leeds different is the grassroots layer: a university society with a full calendar, dance teams renting studio space by the hour, and a stubborn network of fans who organise group orders the week an album drops. It's the sort of city where a shop assistant will tell you, unprompted, which tteokbokki sauce the students actually buy.

Bristol: small, scrappy, food-obsessed

Bristol's Korean footprint is modest and spread across Gloucester Road and the city-centre food quarters. Expect a couple of properly good fried chicken spots, a grocery or two with a serious freezer aisle, and a pop-up culture that thrives at markets like St Nicholas. The city's independent-food obsession helps: Korean ingredients turn up in delis, on weekend street-food line-ups and in the crossover zone with Bristol's fermentation and coffee people. Don't come expecting a Koreatown afternoon. Come for one excellent lunch and a bag of frozen mandu for the freezer.

Cardiff: young, student-shaped, still forming

Cardiff's Korean community is younger and more student-shaped, clustered around Cathays and the edge of the centre where the university's international cohort lives. Groceries are compact and heavy on convenience — instant noodles, ready-made banchan, the freezer staples that get a halls kitchen through a dissertation. The restaurant side is growing more slowly, but fried chicken and barbecue have found a foothold, and the local Korean society runs the kind of low-key meet-ups that turn into actual friendships. Geography helps too: a decent train link to Bristol means the two scenes borrow from each other, and fans shuttle between them for events.

What all six have in common

No official designation, for a start. Nobody drew a boundary or commissioned a sign. In every case the anchor is a grocery — the place where you can buy the right brand of chilli paste, ask what day the fresh kimchi arrives and find out where to eat afterwards. The restaurant is the living room; the student society is the publicity department. Owners are usually families or former students who stayed on, and marketing happens on Instagram and group chats rather than through any tourist board.

How to do a weekend properly

• Friday night: barbecue or fried chicken. Book ahead for groups of four or more; walk-ins work better earlier in the week.
• Saturday morning: the grocery run, before the shelves are stripped. Take a tote, and ask about delivery days for fresh sides.
• Saturday afternoon: find a bakery or café. This is where cup-sleeve events and small meet-ups get announced, usually on a noticeboard you'd otherwise walk past.
• Sunday: a lot of small kitchens shut. Check hours before you travel — this is the most common wasted trip in regional K-food.
• Money and manners: card is widely accepted, but smaller groceries still appreciate cash. Prices are generally gentler than London's, which is rather the point.

The point of a Koreatown

A Koreatown isn't really a place — it's a habit. Six streets, one grocer, a group chat and a Saturday queue is enough. New Malden will always be the reference point, and rightly so. But the more interesting story in 2026 is happening in cities where nobody was looking, built by people who couldn't afford to keep travelling south for dinner.