How hip is Tampa? Since we live in the area, we'd probably be tempted to break it down a little further, like, "well, Tampa Heights is obviously hip, but Carrollwood?"
But how hip is Tampa, overall, to the outside world? Hip enough to just barely miss making the 10 "most hipster cities" in the world, apparently. According to moving/relocation advice-and-services site MoveHub's International Hipster Index — which ranks cities' hipness by assigning them a score out of 10 based on stuff like coffee shops, availability of vegan food, number of record stores, and ostensibly the volume of eggs produced by urban chicken coops — Tampa is the 11th-hippest city on the planet in 2018, reports Business Insider.
That's right, the city across the bay from the city that thinks it's the hippest city on earth can actually claim to be one of them this year. Tampa beat out such well-known havens of hipness as New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco and Bordeaux, France (?!) to fall just short of the Top 10. But being the 11th-hippest city in the world doesn't even make you the hippest city in Florida these days; Orlando, Miami and Fort Lauderdale all placed higher on MoveHub's list, surprising us and basically making us question what exactly ELSE is among the criteria for MoveHub's list.
(As for St. Pete, the 'Burg is nowhere to be found among the 446 entries on the list. St. Pete says it doesn't care, but get a couple of PBRs into it and it'll carp that it doesn't have the population numbers to qualify, that's all, man.)
And if you're wondering what the most hipster city in the world might be in 2018, no, it's not Portland or Austin. (PDX came in 2nd, while ATX languished back at 55th.) This year, the most hipster city in the world is, of course, Brighton, a seaside town in the south of England that features that country's most famous pier, and was once the setting of a terrifying story by British horror author Ramsey Campbell.
(That's actually kind of hip.)
This article appears in Apr 12-19, 2018.
