Day 4: Hexagons

Todays map is of our town centre and high-street definitions. The extent and boundaries of these areas are identified based on the density and connectivity patterns of individual retail units over space, with the areas delineated using H3 polygons.

A high resolution hexagonal grid is superimposed over spatial clusters of retail points and a network-based algorithm used to identify mutually exclusive tracts. Agglomerations are then pruned and fine-tuned according to a series of heuristic rules.

Our retail agglomerations represent local commerce areas with shopping amenities and are assigned to a hierarchical classification ranking from the largest Regional Centres, Major Town Centres and Town Centres, down to Small Local Centres and Retail Parks.

Full details can be found in this paper:

Macdonald, J. L., Dolega, L., & Singleton, A. (2022). An open source delineation and hierarchical classification of UK retail agglomerations. Scientific Data, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01556-3