Our solution
As COVID revealed, retail doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. If offices are closed, or fewer people commute, retail suffers. A retail-only view is not enough.
Since 2016, we have made more than 2,500 Freedom of Information requests and curated almost 20 million records on individual commercial locations in England and Wales.
openLocal tracks the history of all types of business units, across England and Wales, irrespective of their proximity to active high streets or town centres. We integrate a wide variety of source data imported from thousands of openly licenced datasets published as spreadsheets by local and national government.
Data are assembled via a combination of machine-learning techniques – including regression analysis, natural language processing and pattern-matching – into a single, unified geospatial database supporting research requirements for complex queries. All sources are automatically imported and processed, save for local rates data which are processed manually and algorithmically by our data wranglers.
Outcomes
We have supported the Greater London Authority (GLA), the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG, both BEIS and MHCLG are now Ministry for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, DLUHC), University College London (UCL) and the universities of Leeds, Northumbria, and Warwick, and research groups like Centre for Cities, Centre for London and the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC).
Our data and analysis have served to inform analysis into the COVID lockdown period, the Levelling Up economic recovery response, and research into meanwhile use for empty shops, business energy consumption, the impact of rates on business vacancy, and business activity clustering maps.
