The dataset contains footfall counts in Leeds City Centre supplied by Leeds City Council. There are 10 cameras around the city that monitor numbers of people walking past. These cameras calculate numbers on an hourly basis. The raw data is freely available on Data Mill North; however a cleaned and aggregated dataset has been produced for the purposes of analysis by Leeds Institute for Data Analytics in collaboration with the Consumer Data Research Centre.

The dataset is comprised of hourly footfall counts and has been cleaned according to the needs of the research project for which they were gathered. Variables for British Retail Consortium (BRC) weeks and months are also present.

Data are provided (as of 30th April 2021) in respect of:

• 10 locations identified by name. Further details can be gained by contacting Leeds City Council.
• The date and hour of each record
• Counts of hourly footfall generated by the cameras and cleaned of duplicates
• Filename of the csv file made available by Leeds City Council
• British Retail Consortium (BRC) week number, month number, month name and year

The raw data for the study is generated independently by Leeds City Council and available for public use. Whilst it is already used commercially to show footfall trends in the city centre, it has featured in several pieces of novel research investigating suitability for representing the ambient (daytime) population. The project that generated the current version of the aggregated dataset focused on use modelling how changes in COVID-19 lockdown policies impacted footfall and predicting what ‘business as usual’ may have looked like.

The locations with a full set of 104904 records (hours) are: Albion Street South, Briggate, Briggate at McDonalds, Commercial Street Combined, Dortmund Square and headrow. The data has been filtered to start in August 2008, which is when 7 cameras were fully operational - the 6 above and Albion Street North, which only has 83398 records due to missing data. The other cameras, which came online later, are Albion Street at McDonalds (2184 records), Commercial Street at Barratts (76368) and Park Row (2184). Some files were either missing data or structured in such a way that made it difficult to automate aggregation. These were omitted and are classed as missing, despite data being present. There are 793,558 records in total.