Owl’s post box yesterday was full of reports from the local press around the country listing the most isolated communities in their neck of the woods. Turns out that they were all using a new fine structure data base constructed by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), recently released.

This ONS data breaks down England into neighbourhoods, or ‘lower super output areas’, which contain roughly the same number of people (around 1,500 in all).

That means neighbourhoods in densely-populated cities and towns tend to be much smaller, and average travel times to key services tend to be shorter.

Lightly-populated neighbourhoods are bigger and tend to fare much worse in the rankings.

The study ranks every one of 32,844 neighbourhoods in England based on how long the ONS says it takes an average person to reach primary and secondary schools, GP surgeries and food shops, plus major railway stations and major airports.

Owl and Owl’s helpers have been unable to find a link to this data base – probably because it will be very large and difficult to interpret.

What we have located is this related summary:

Click to access 01_Statistical_Digest_of_Rural_England_2020_January_edition.pdf

The Statistical Digest of Rural Statistics is a collection of statistics on a range of social and economic subject areas. The statistics are split by rural and urban areas, allowing for comparisons between the different rural and urban area classifications. The Digest includes high level statistics which present an overall picture for England. However, there is likely to be considerable variation in individual towns, villages and hamlets. The Digest starts with a section on the rural and urban populations in England. This is followed by a rural economy section containing indicators on economic activity, earnings, productivity as well as a selection of indicators relating to economic growth. The Rural accessibility section includes data on transport, measuring accessibility to services and broadband. The final section of the Digest includes a selection of rural living statistics on housing, household expenditure, poverty, education, health and crime.

Sections of the Digest are updated throughout the year. In this edition the following section(s) have been updated:

• Population at local authority level
• Productivity by industry
• Accessibility to services
• Residential housing transactions

The report runs to 213 pages. Enjoy!