🆕Functional Areas

The OS Functional Areas Collection gives you access to the most current and comprehensive functional areas defined by Ordnance Survey as a standalone collection. Functional Areas are algorithmically derived notional geographical extents; this distinguishes them from the OS Boundaries Collection which contains boundary extents specified by authoritative organisations.

The collection is currently comprised of three retail areas feature types:

• Retail Area Aggregated – features provide information on retail areas, from small local centres, through town centres to a single national centre

• Retail Area Major – features reflect high streets, shopping centres and retail parks

• Retail Area Minor – features reflect smaller clusters of retail addresses

These feature types define notional geographic extents of retail locations across Great Britain, identifying clusters of buildings with retail addresses. More detail is provided on the individual feature type pages.

Example showing Retail Area Aggregated, Retail Area Major and Retail Area Minor features in the centre of Southampton. A background map has been included for context.

We plan to release more feature types in future for other kinds of functional areas, including office areas, leisure areas and more.

Collection applications

The OS Functional Areas Collection allows you to:

Policy & planning

• Improve decision making for economic areas at both local and national levels.

• Create and refine plans for local areas.

• Support future policy development.

• Evaluate policy implementation and performance by performing counterfactual analysis to understand what interventions are working well.

Analysis & research

• Provide consistent retail area definitions across local authorities.

• Perform granular analysis and provide statistics based on structured layers and attribution.

• Conduct academic research based on population-level behaviours.

Visualisation

• Create data visualisations for communication and analysis (for example, local plans, differences between interventions).

Investment strategies

• Support regeneration efforts and investment planning (for example, Towns Fund, Future High Streets Fund).

• Improve transport provision planning (for example, bus routes).

• Improve the decision making of retail chains when selecting new store locations.

Example showing a Retail Area Major feature in the centre of Edinburgh. The Address Count attribution against the feature allows you to calculate the address classification mix for the polygon, i.e. what percentage of the polygon is comprised of retail, residential, industrial, office and other addresses. A background map has been included for context.

Key elements

Attribution for the three retail area feature types includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Retail Setting which describes the type of retail area at the location or that the feature supports (available for the Retail Area Major Feature Type only).

• A modelled hierarchy of retail centres and satellite retail areas, declining in size around large retail centres to enable comparisons of similar areas (available for the Retail Area Aggregated Feature Type only).

• Metadata about the retail area, such as address counts and residential density, allowing analysis of the makeup of areas.

• Cross-references to other datasets, such as Government Statistical Service (GSS) codes, grid references and the Built Address Feature Type.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about this collection and detailed answers are available from the FAQs page.

Coverage

Great Britain.

Default coordinate reference system

British National Grid (EPSG: 27700).

Temporal filtering

The earliest date on which you can request a one-off snapshot of a date in the past for data in this collection is noted at the top of the individual feature type pages.

Supply formats

GeoPackage or CSV (comma-separated values).

Supply mechanism

OS Functional Areas Collection data can be accessed through the OS Data Hub via OS Select+Build, the bespoke OS NGD download service. It can't be accessed through OS NGD API – Features or OS NGD API – Tiles.

Using our data

Included in the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) – therefore, it's free at point of use for Public Sector organisations. You can check if your organisation is a member of the PSGA on the OS website.