COVID-19 Lockdown High Street Resilience Classification is a CDRC research generated dataset based on data provided by the Local Data Company (LDC) to estimate the resilience of high streets in Britain after the challenges of government-enforced COVID-19 pandemic restrictions between March 2020 and August 2021. The data provides the first set of comprehensive resilience characteristics for high streets across Great Britain, based on calculations made with the LDC dataset. It will be possible to study retail characteristics at a high spatial resolution, looking at characteristics rarely captured at the high street level, and for the extent of Great Britain.

The dataset contains aggregated indicators at the British high street level as defined by the CDRC retail centre boundaries (containing 15 or more retail locations) and using the Ordnance Survey’s (2019) definition of a high street. The retail centre boundaries were taken from seven selected classifications (district centre, small local centre, local centre, major town centre, regional centre, market town, town centre) and excluded retail parks and out-of-town shopping centres.

The data contain information from 2019-2021, classifying each high street into one of 4 ranks of resilience and supplementing it with a resilience class variable to list the qualities of each high street in relation to pre-pandemic vacancy, post-lockdown restriction vacancy, pre-pandemic occupier changes, and the proportion of services allowed to remain open during restrictions.

For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The data represent aggregates calculated primarily from the LDC retail type, vacancy and address dataset, which contains near complete coverage of retailers across Great Britain. Coding of retail type (e.g. comparison) varies in consistency between different iterations (e.g. 2016), but have been recalculated and verified for these indicators.

The indicators do not cover all 6,423 centres in the CDRC retail centre boundaries data pack. To ensure security, indicators were developed for those retail centres not classified as ‘Retail Parks’ or ‘Out-of-Town shopping centres’ and containing over 15 LDC units (to protect commercial sensitivity of the LDC data). In addition, indicators were not developed for any centres in Northern Ireland (due to a lack of LDC data).