The Retail Centre Boundaries are part of an openly available suite of data products representing the location, extent and function of retail agglomeration areas across the UK.

Retail centres, or agglomerations, are identified based on the clustering and connectivity patterns of individual retail units over space. They have been delineated using consistent methods and data for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The spatial granularity and detail of retail agglomerations provide a national picture of retail spaces and hierarchy. Developing indicators that can help to understand their characteristics and economic performance can provide useful supporting information for policy in identifying underperforming and/or thriving retail centres across the UK.

These latest boundaries improve on the previous 2022 release in a number of ways. The most significant changes are:

• Open UK-wide POI input data. The previous version combined Valuation Office Agency (VOA) records in England and Wales with OpenStreetMap (OSM) for coverage in Scotland and Northern Ireland. This release is built primarily on Foursquare OS Places, an openly licensed, pre-geocoded point-of-interest source that covers all four UK nations to a consistent standard, bringing significant improvements in Scotland and Northern Ireland where coverage was previously weaker.
• Subcentres within major cities. Large city centres are now split into recognisable subcentres, separating, for example, a prime shopping core from a neighbouring entertainment quarter.
• Retail parks identified directly. For the first time, retail parks are identified directly by recognising well-known big-box retailers (such as B&Q, Currys and IKEA), rather than being added in afterwards.

Content

Boundaries are delineated using openly available, geocoded retail-specific unit locations and land use. Self-contained, mutually exclusive tracts of consistently sized hexagon geometries are overlaid on retail clusters, with network-based algorithmic fine-tuning based on absolute sizes and densities.

The retail centres are developed consistently for all countries across the UK. In total, there are 9,623 retail agglomerations across the four nations.

A hierarchical classification based on retail count, density and ranking within the respective local area identifies the prominence of each retail centre and captures variation between regional centres, market towns, small local centres, shopping centres and retail outlets, among 11 classification tiers. Conventional place names are drawn from the Ordnance Survey (OS) Open Names file.

Quality, Representation and Bias

Retail agglomerations are built on a series of heuristic rules based on spatial density and size, using openly available point retail locations. The underlying shop and business locations come from Foursquare OS Places.

Before the centres are determined, the data is cleaned to remove retail venues that have closed, businesses recorded in the wrong place, and duplicate entries, so that the results reflect places that are currently open and trading as closely as possible.

Land-use information from OpenStreetMap (OSM) is used as a supporting layer, to extend the edges of retail parks and to screen out places that look like retail clusters but are actually business parks, trading estates or warehousing.