OS Functional Areas
What OS Functional Areas provides you with
Consistent data
Reduce costs and unlock new insights straight away: access readily available retail location data for the whole of Great Britain.
Local to national view
OS’s retail area classifications – major, minor, and aggregated – show the significance and impact of retail areas on a local address, region or nationally. View consistent retail area definitions, even across local authorities.
Highly visual
Retail areas can be styled and visualised, according to their characteristics and attributes. Explore enhanced data visualisation for enriched communication and analysis.
Built on collaboration
OS Functional Areas has been generated through a consistent, algorithmic process, which has been developed and refined through extensive consultation with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and other authoritative bodies.
Use cases
Make better decisions
Enable improved decision-making for economic areas, at local, regional and national levels. Based on consistent data, organisations both public and private can prioritise investments, resources, and site selection; conduct market analysis and logistics optimisation, and inform transport provision planning.
Evaluate the impact of decisions
See the outcomes of insight and analysis: track the impact of investments and interventions, by analysing the data as it is updated over time. Identify equivalent retail areas in other locations to compare changes, and model counterfactual scenarios.
Track customer behaviour
Retail-based organisations can use this data to decide on potential store locations, for maximum impact. OS Functional Areas also enables effective analysis of card transactions and socio-economic patterns, which can also feed into academic research interested in population level behaviours (for example, UCL’s Healthy Urban Places which quantifies health outcomes and designs future interventions).
Scenario modelling
OS Functional Areas enables counterfactual analysis, to help better understand what interventions work, to then replicate success. Conduct evaluations of performance and policy implementations, such as analysing the impact of Post Offices present on high streets.