The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) fills a gap in UK spatial data that Census and government statistics leave open: how people behave as consumers. Its datasets cover residential mobility, retail activity, broadband access, and neighborhood-level classifications that describe places through the lens of spending patterns and commercial infrastructure rather than just demographics.
For GIS analysts working on site selection, retail strategy, or urban planning in the UK, CDRC provides layers that are difficult to source elsewhere at this geographic resolution.
Originally a joint initiative between the University of Leeds and University College London, CDRC's data has transitioned to two successor platforms — Geographic Data Service (GeoDS) at UCL and Healthy and Sustainable Places at Leeds. Open datasets are available in CSV and Shapefile formats, making them easy to bring into Atlas, QGIS, or ArcGIS.
They pair well with ONS Census data and Ordnance Survey boundaries, letting you combine demographic baselines with consumer behavior indicators in the same analysis — for example, overlaying residential mobility indices on housing development maps, or comparing broadband access patterns against deprivation scores across local authorities.
