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2	Client	LIQUIDATION CENTER
3	Data Analyst	Ganesh Sankar
4	Research Question	Britain’s high street crisis by numbers
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6	Date	05/01/2026
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8	Research Method
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10	Liquidation Centre conducted this study to identify and analyze failed high street businesses in the UK. To achieve this, data was sourced from the Free Company Data product published by the UK government, which provides year-on-year information for all registered companies. In total, ~5.5 million businesses were analyzed, with data dating back to 2016.
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12	Since there were no direct data available for high streets in the UK, an approximation of high street was derived based on business concentration (town centers). These were derived using the following criteria: - For each local authority in the geocoded data, a 50m² grid was overlayed for that LA. - Then for each grid as a point in a particular LA, the number of businesses within a 500m radius was counted. - The points with the business density were sorted and the point with highest number of business within a 500m radius was taken as the town center. - These derived town centers were then spatially joined with all the registered businesses to get the number of "High street" businesses.
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14	The raw dataset contains various business registration metrics for each company registered in the UK, including the registered address. To derive location-level data, such as region and local authority, postcodes were geocoded using Postcode.io, a free UK service that converts postcodes into geographic coordinates for all the registered companies.
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16	To associate geocoded companies with regions and local authorities, two separate shapefiles were used, one for each category. These were then spatially joined to calculate aggregated statistics at both the regional and local authority levels.
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18	To rank the aggregated data, the liquidation rate was calculated based on the total number of businesses and the number of companies with the following statuses: statuses = [ 'In Administration', 'ADMINISTRATIVE RECEIVER', 'VOLUNTARY ARRANGEMENT / ADMINISTRATIVE RECEIVER', 'Liquidation', 'In Administration/Administrative Receiver', 'ADMINISTRATION ORDER' ]
19	Caveats: - The main dataset does not include exact liquidation dates or the date when a liquidation claim was raised. Instead, the liquidation date was approximated using the "ConfStmtNextDueDate" field for companies with a liquidation status. While not exact, this provides a reasonable estimate. - The town centers were filtered for only centers with atleast 1500 businesses within a 500m radius.
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21	Sources
22	https://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html
23	https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/activitysizeandlocation/datasets/businessdemographyreferencetable
24	https://postcodes.io/
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