The Greens have hailed a “phenomenal” set of local election results in which the party has so far gained nearly 90 seats, including some in distinctly non-traditional Green areas such as in north-east England.

In another sign of a shift away from the major parties, independent councillors gained more than 300 council seats. However, even with Nigel Farage’s new Brexit party not represented, Ukip lost the majority of its councillors.

The Green co-leader Jonathan Bartley said that while the party had been building gradually in many of the areas where it gained new councillors, it had also benefited from pro-remain sentiment and from the recent prominence of global warming protests.

With 148 of 248 councils fully tallied, the party had won 108 councillors, an increase of 86 on 2015.

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The Greens had done well in 2015, in contrast to the other big winner in Thursday’s elections, the Liberal Democrats, whose gains came after terrible results four years ago. The 2015 poll was held on the same day as a general election in which the Greens won more than 1m votes, 3.8% of the total.

Bartley’s co-leader, Siân Berry, said the party had won its first councillors in areas not seen as traditionally Green areas, including South Tyneside, Sunderland, Colchester, Folkestone and the Cotswolds.

“We’ve broken through on to the councils to become the new voice,” she told BBC News. “We’ve done that through hard work, basically. I can pretty confidently say we’re going to have a record number of Greens on a record number of councils.”

In Sunderland, the Greens defeated Labour in Washington South. In South Tyneside, the party crushed Labour as its candidate took more than two-thirds of the vote to become the first Green member of the council.

Bartley called it “a phenomenal set of results so far”. He told the Guardian that the gains came from a combination of concerted local efforts coupled with a boost from both the Brexit impasse and the prominence of climate change issues after the Extinction Rebellion protests and the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s UK visit.

“You can clearly see the result of that work, but also there has clearly been a natural lift in results, which helps,” he said. “You’ve got that underlying groundwork, but also that few percent on top of that because of Brexit and climate.”

On Brexit, Bartley said, the Greens were also tapping into “what underlies the Brexit vote, which was that anger of neglect and people not listening, and the safe seats which never changed hands”.

But he acknowledged there was also a direct benefit to the party from disgruntled remain-minded Labour supporters switching sides.

He said: “That’s undoubtedly true. We’ve had 2,000 new members in April, and a lot of them were former Labour supporters. It’s the focus on climate, the anti-austerity approach and being unequivocally pro-remain – and that kind of trinity is unique, there’s no one else doing it.”

In contrast, it was shaping up to be a terrible election for Ukip, which was fighting only 16% of all seats, against 44% in 2015. It had so far lost 71 councillors, winning only 18 seats.

Independents, with their haul of more than 300 seats, more than doubled their combined numbers across councils.