The Local Data Company (LDC) Retail Unit data offers insights into the locations and characteristics of retail activity and vacancy across Great Britain. Held by the CDRC and supplied by the Local Data Company (LDC), the datasets contain details of retail locations in Great Britain, which have been surveyed by LDC.

Retail Type and Vacancy data tables include:

• Shop name
• Shop use
• Classification
• Category
• Sub Category (inc. Retail Type/Vacancy)

Retail Address data table includes:

• Unit
• Building
• Street No
• Street
• Town
• Postcode
• Latitude
• Longitude

If you are interested in local authority district level aggregated data, please see the Related Record link below.

Content

The snapshots are one for the years from 2009 to 2016, two for the years 2018 and 2019, one for the years from 2020 until the current year.
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

Depending on year, before 2019, about 70% of the locations have building level accuracy with the rest having postcode level accuracy.
The representation varies among the datasets with the most recent years being the most complete, which means that additional caution should be taken with temporal analysis.