These are older retail centre boundary/centroid products created by the CDRC in 2015 and 2017. They have been superseded by the 2022 version - please see the Related Record link below.

The 2015 boundaries represent the retail centre centroids that were used on the CDRC 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; Data analysis by the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre."

The 2017 boundaries were produced from the 2015 LDC Retail units location dataset (also available on CDRC 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.