Version: 4.0 | Published: 5 Jun 2026 | Updated: 0 days ago
Retail Centre Boundaries
Dataset
Summary
Description:
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.
Contact Point:
Documentation
Documentation:
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, where possible, for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The spatial granularity and detail of retail agglomerations provide a national picture of retail spaces and hierarchy.
## Content
Boundaries are delineated using openly available and geocoded retail-specific unit locations and land use. Self-contained mutually exclusive tracts of consistently-sized hexagon geometries are overlaid on retail clusters, with a 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 agglomerations of retail across the countries.
A hierarchical classification based on retail count, density and ranking within the respective local area serves to identify 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).
## Quality, Representation and Bias
To follow.
Coverage
Spatial
Spatial Coverage:
United Kingdom
Temporal
Start Date:
01 July 2025
End Date:
30 June 2026
Frequency:
QUADRENNIAL
Provenance
Author 1
Name Organisation:
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.
Access and Governance
Format and Standards
Format:
- geopackage
- parquet
- CSV
- HTML
Origin
Name:
Geographic