Our friends at The Local Data Company have been busy analysing the data in Town Centre Intelligence (TCI), the all-singing all-dancing urban information tool we helped them develop.

You couldn’t move for stories about retail vacancies derived from TCI data last week, and no wonder – our high streets have a gap-toothed look about them just now, and the information from TCI is really too good to ignore. See how the BBC covered the story here.

TCI allows easy (and statistically robust) comparisons between town centres – defined consistently across Great Britain by the government boundaries defined by a Geofutures methodology.

This reveals significant regional variations in the vacancy rate – southern towns and cities are still faring much better than their northern counterparts, where vacancy rates have doubled since mid-2008, while Wales and the West are performing better than average with only a 25% increase in the same period.

A similar pattern [...] Continue Reading…

Town Centre Intelligence (TCI), the new urban data management tool we developed for The Local Data Company, reveals that UK retail vacancy rates rose from 4% to 12% in the 6 months to March.

We were chuffed to see that the Financial Times used this information as a source for a headline story on 16 May 2009, also using the data to highlight the worst-affected sectors – predictably perhaps, these are fashion, electrical, furniture DIY and jewellery retailers.

The application delivers constantly-updated data on 675 town centres across Great Britain, giving instant insights to planners, developers and investors into the retail mix and the health of the high street.

TCI highlights that the last two quarters have seen fast growth in the rate of shop vacancies, with particularly high levels in the north east of England and the West Midlands, as the contour map created by Geofutures for the FT illustrates.

Continue Reading…