Resources

cartography

We’ve put together a single web page where you can download geodata for individual local authority areas in Great Britain – or all of them at once – in GeoPackage format. We took data from the Office for National Statistics and Ordnance Survey, split it by local authority, and then put it in separate folders for boundaries, buildings, greenspace, places, rail, roads, surface water, ward boundaries and terrain. There are also zipped file packages for every local authority area in Great Britain – these will be automatically styled when you drop them into QGIS. You’ll notice that in each of the main folders we’ve included a file that covers all of Great Britain, just in case you need the whole lot.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2022.

politics

There have been many elections in the United Kingdom in recent years, with the most recent General Election being in December 2019. The full results have been compiled by the fantastic team at the House of Commons Library, so we’re going one step further here and making them available in GeoPackage, geojson and shapefile formats. The GeoPackage is pre-styled so if you add it to QGIS it will appear as in the examples shown in the image below (the labels will come on when you zoom in). For the geojson and shapefile versions, there is a qml style file that will style the layer, so long as you it is in the same folder as the layer itself. For the shapefile, this is included in the zipped folder.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021 The election results data were compiled by the team at the House of Commons Library. Note: this file contains the results of the UK General Election from election day 2019 – it does not include subsequent by-election results (e.g. the 2021 Hartlepool by-election).

social

Our GB Postcode Deprivation Finder is a very simple web tool we’ve put together so that anyone can enter a full postcode and then find out where that postcode sits in relation to the various deprivation indices used across Great Britain. We are not able to include Northern Ireland postcodes here, due to licencing restrictions. See the small print on the page itself for more information.

Source: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021 | Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2021 | Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.

CARTOGRAPHY

We are pleased to be able to share this digital terrain model of Great Britain, created using Ordnance Survey open data (their Terrain 50 product). Included in the download are three files – one is a full resolution raster file (156MB) for use in packages such as QGIS, one is a small-file-size rendered, non-georeferenced version (31MB), and the other one (16MB) was specifically created for use in Aerialod and other rendering software. The data are provided in a single web folder. We created this file by combining 2,859 individual tiles for Great Britain and then compressing them into a reasonably-sized tif file.

Source: Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2022.

BUILT ENVIRONMENT

We’re huge fans of the Microsoft Building Footprints project, but it isn’t always easy for GIS users to work with the data in the format it’s published in. For this reason, we’ve converted each state buildings dataset from GeoJSON to GeoPackage format and put them on a separate download page. We’ve also added a county code and name column to each file. This means users can more easily filter the data. There are around 130 million buildings in the complete dataset and our version comes in at more than 30GB for the whole country, but like the original source it’s divided into single states. Despite the size of the files, you should find that even the largest ones load fairly quickly in QGIS. They can also be used in other software, such as ArcGIS Pro or R.

Source: Microsoft Building Footprints, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0.

BUILT ENVIRONMENT

We have also created a single GeoPackage containing all buildings in Great Britain as well as individual GeoPackages for every local authority. The full Great Britain GeoPackage is 4.2 GB in size and it should work flawlessly in QGIS. The individual local authority files are mostly under 20MB in size. The full Great Britain file contains a field indicating which local authority a building is in (using 2022 boundary data) so it can be filtered easily.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2022.

SOCIAL

We have put together a single file of one of the most commonly used English datasets, containing all data relating to the 2019 English Indices of Deprivation – in both Shapefile and GeoPackage format. This contains everything you’ll need to map and analyse patterns of deprivation across England, using the latest data and the most detailed LSOA boundary file.

Source: MHCLG, 2019 and Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020.

CARTOGRAPHY

This is a file containing over 42,000 populated places in Great Britain. We put it together using Ordnance Survey open data and you can download it in different formats – and with a ready-to-go QGIS project on this GitHub repository. Since it’s Ordnance Survey data, the file covers England, Wales and Scotland only. Place names can be displayed – where applicable – in Gaelic or Welsh, or all in English. If you download the QGIS project from the GitHub page and read the information there you’ll see that we’ve added some filters and queries when it comes to using this data in your projects. We have made this file available as a shapefile, geopackage and geojson.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020.

CARTOGRAPHY

We have also created a UK local authorities layer that contains as part of it inset maps for a number of urban areas across the UK that are harder to see when the map is zoomed to the full UK level. So, when you download the Shapefile and add it to your GIS software, you will see all UK local authorities in their normal place, plus the enlarged inset maps. Greater London has been enlarged 5x and the other inset areas have been enlarged 3x. This allows us to more easily see the data on the map at the full UK scale. There is also a file that contains the inset outline boxes, and population data and area data is included in the inset Shapefile, plus style files. We have included further instructions on the insets repository. This should make things easier for anyone who needs to include (e.g.) a Greater London inset in their map.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020.