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Does anyone know where I could find an up to date data set of amenities for the UK?

I'm working on a study which needs to understand the distributional impact of a potential development proposal, in this instance in the Greater Manchester area. As part of this I need to obtain local amenity information including but not exclusive to the following:

  • Doctors/GPs
  • Schools
  • Nurseries
  • Playgrounds
  • Parks/Open Spaces
  • Hospitals
  • Care Homes/ Day Centres
  • Community Centres

From previous GIS projects I was aware of the Department for Transport core accessibility indicator data set but the latest set dates back to 2010 which is quite dated. Also I've looked at OSM data, looking at building type and extracting the types I'm interested in but I think the information is very limited as apparently there isn't a single doctors within the Manchester Salford Inner Relief Route which I know isn't correct.

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The most accurate data will come from the Ordnance Survey PointsOfInterest data, but that will be expensive, though if your project has a budget and the area is limited to the Greater Manchester area, it might be affordable.

As for OSM, it does have some limitations as it is partially crowd-sourced data but is usually pretty good nonetheless. I also know there is actually at least one doctor in the OSM data in the MSIRR area. So, as well as searching by building, try searching by amenity (likewise for the other POIs). Also try searching on healthcare. For playgrounds you need to search the leisure tag. With OSM it is a case of reading the documentatino to discover the best category or categories to search in. Use the search box at the top of either of the OSM pages I have linked to to find documentation on your other POIs. Searching by building type alone is insufficient (especially as some of these are not buildings).

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  • Thanks for this, the client for the project is public sector so they could have an open government licence in place to obtain the OS POI data, I'll investigate that.
    – Chris Carr
    Commented Dec 4, 2015 at 14:28
  • Oh and regarding OSM I downloaded the Greater Manchester zip from Mapzen and this included the amenities shapefile which I didn't have previously in the geofabrik download I was using. The Mapzen looks more detailed and could provide the level of information I need
    – Chris Carr
    Commented Dec 4, 2015 at 14:30
  • For getting the data from OSM, try Overpass Turbo. You can use the wizard to search for a particular feature.
    – vclaw
    Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 2:30

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