Retail Centre Boundaries (Previous Versions)

These are older retail centre boundary/centroid products created by the GeoDS in 2015 and 2017. They have been superseded a newer version - please see the Related Record link below.

The 2015 boundaries represent the retail centre centroids that were used on our maps website prior to October 2017. They were created in 2015 from centroid locations taken from those definitions of retail cores defined as part of the DCLG State of the Cities Report in 2005. To attribute these, please use the following text "Contains Department for Communities and Local Government Data; the data for this research have been provided by the Geographic Data Service (geods.ac.uk), a Smart Data Research UK Investment: ES/Z504464/1."

The 2017 boundaries were produced from the 2015 LDC Retail units location dataset (also available on GeoDS Data), and built using the Graph-DBSCAN clustering method.

The Retail Centre Typology (2018) is based on the 2017 boundaries and is a multidimensional taxonomy of retail and consumption spaces in Great Britain focussing on four domains: the composition, diversity, function and economic health of the centres. It’s a two-tier classification with 5 Supergroups and 15 nested Groups of which descriptions (Pen Portraits) are provided. Point centroids of the retail areas defined are included here.

Content

Downloadable CSVs, Shapefile and GeoPackage-format GIS files for the retail centre centroids, extent boundaries, drive/walk-time catchments and a typology/classification of each retail centre. These are all available below, along with data summaries and a variable dictionary.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The boundaries are dependent on the frequency of the source data updates - not all retail areas are surveyed every year in the source dataset, so some extent changes may not be captured. New retail areas may also not appear in the boundary products for some years after they are created, again due to source data update cycles.

Open

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source Local Data Company; Department for Communities and Local Government
Author Pavlis, Michalis; Dolega, Les; Singleton, Alex
Maintainer Les Dolega
Version 1.0 and 2.0
Last Updated May 8, 2025, 15:26 (UTC)
Created December 17, 2024, 12:21 (UTC)
Attribution The data for this research have been provided by the Geographic Data Service (geods.ac.uk), a Smart Data Research UK Investment: ES/Z504464/1. (2017/2018 version) Contains LDC data 2015. (2015 version) Contains Department for Communities and Local Government Data.
DOI 10.20390/retailcentres2015
Granularity Retail Centre
Spatial Coverage Great Britain
Temporal Coverage July 2017 to July 2018