Advanced GIS Methods Training: Retail Centres and Catchment Areas

This course explains what retail centres are, and different methods of constructing catchments for them, including fixed-ring buffers, drive time catchments and Huff model catchments.

It is split into two parts, each with a video clip and a workbook to work through:

  • Part 1: Retail Centres
  • Part 2: Retail Catchment Areas

You need some prior knowledge of R to get the most from this course. If you are new to R, we recommend you complete the Short Course on Using R as a GIS first.

After completing the material, you will:

  • Understand what the Retail Centres dataset is and what it looks like
  • Know how to construct a basic Hierarchy for the Retail Centres
  • Know how to delineate fixed-ring buffers for the Retail Centres
  • Know how to derive drive-time catchments for Retail Centres using the HERE API
  • Understand what a Huff model is, and what its basic components are
  • Know how to build a Huff model for Retail Centres in the Liverpool City Region
  • Know how to delineate catchments for each Retail Centre using the Huff model

To access the course, click on Download next to the 'Part 1: Retail Centres' or 'Part 2: Retail Catchment Areas' files below. It is recommended that you have the course material open in one window, and RStudio open in another window next to it, using either a big monitor, or two monitors. Also download the data zip file listed below. If you have any comments or feedback, please email us.

This course is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.

Tutorial

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source VOA, OSM, HERE, GeoDS
Author Singleton, Alex
Maintainer Alex Singleton
Last Updated May 8, 2025, 15:21 (UTC)
Created November 28, 2024, 14:20 (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.
Spatial Coverage United Kingdom