Datasets related to UK Geographies

Last update: 21-07-2022

Do not use this package in production at the moment as it is still a work in progress.

With a much longer delay than expected, I'm now back to work on it, hoping for a final version by the end of August 2022, after the ONS AUG-22 Postcodes Directory update.

Overview

This R package provides unified information about most geographical areas in the UK. All geographies, apart from WPZ-Workplace Zone, are built on top of the minimal OA Output Area (or SA Small Area as they are called in N.Ireland.). This means that some of the maps that you draw upon them are only a geographical approximation of the corresponding developed by the ONS (notice though that not all the boundaries found in the package are developed or shared by the ONS).

Installation

The package is not on CRAN (it can't be due to its size).

You can instead install this package from github as:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github('lvalnegri/RgeoUK')

Notice that because of the mass of information contained the package file is actually quite big (110Mb), and it'll take a while for download and installation.

You can also installed my other package RbndUK containing the digital vector in sf format of all the geographies included here.

List of Datasets

The package contains the following datasets in data.table format:

• entities

• location_types

• hierarchies

• postcodes

• output_areas

• locations

• lookups

• workplace_zones

• neighbours

The above datasets are also available in CSV format in the data-raw/csv folder, and can be downloaded directly from the repository.

In the data-raw folder you can also find:

• in the maps subfolder, some comparison maps (mainly for the geographies with no exact matching) between the official boundaries and the ones built upon the Output Areas
• in the shp subfolder, the original boundaries in shapefile format as distributed by the official channels

Resources

• Register of Geographic Codes (March 2022)

• Code History Database (December 2021)

• Hierarchical Representation of UK Statistical Geographies (December 2021)

• ONS Postcode Directory (May 2022)

• NHS Postcode Directory (May 2022)

• A Beginners Guide to UK Geography (v.1, 2021)

Attributions

• Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights [2022]

• Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database rights [2022]

• Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0

• Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0

• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database rights [2022]

• (NI only) Contains or is based upon Land & Property Services (LPS) Intellectual Property subject to Crown copyright [License]