The Catalogue, in One Number
This week we finished a piece of slow, thankless infrastructure: mirroring every spatial dataset on planning.data.gov.uk into our own PostGIS database, alongside the brand-new MHCLG Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025 at LSOA level.
The total: 1,033,919 records across 30 datasets, plus 33,755 LSOAs, sitting next to the 28 million EPC certificates and 29 million Land Registry sales we already had.
It means a postcode lookup that used to bounce off four different live APIs now answers in 67 milliseconds with a single spatial query. More interestingly, putting it all on one canvas makes some old data look very different.
Here's what jumps out.
England Has 382,193 Listed Buildings
We always knew there were "around 400,000". Now we can put a number on each grade.
If you're being shown a Grade I house, statistically it's rarer than a £10 note printed with a printing error.
The distribution by grade, drawn with bars:
It's a long tail — almost everything that's listed is Grade II. The "iconic-looking historic house" you imagine when someone says "listed" is most likely Grade II.
The Deprivation Map Has Hardly Moved
IMD 2025 published in March. The most-deprived Local Authority Districts are largely the same names that have topped the table every release since 2010. Our ten worst by share of LSOAs in deciles 1–2:
And the ten least-deprived:
The North–South gap, in two tables.
Protected England Is a Lot of England
Think of it as concentric rings of legal protection. We pulled the count of distinct designations:
Add it up: a million distinct polygons telling you what you can and can't do with land in England. Most of them invisible to the buyer until they read a planning application refusal.
The Ten National Parks
For completeness — these are England's ten:
If your postcode falls inside one of these polygons, you live under the most restrictive planning regime in the country. Permitted development rights are largely stripped, even fence heights need consent.
And the 34 AONBs ("National Landscapes")
Slightly less restrictive than National Parks but still a major planning constraint. Worth knowing the list because the names crop up constantly in search descriptions:
Arnside & Silverdale, Blackdown Hills, Cannock Chase, Chichester Harbour, Chilterns, Cornwall, Cotswolds, Cranborne Chase & West Wiltshire Downs, Dedham Vale, Dorset, East Devon, Forest of Bowland, High Weald, Howardian Hills, Isle of Wight, Isles of Scilly, Kent Downs, Lincolnshire Wolds, Malvern Hills, Mendip Hills, Nidderdale, Norfolk Coast, North Devon, North Pennines, North Wessex Downs, Northumberland Coast, Quantock Hills, Shropshire Hills, Solway Coast, South Devon, Suffolk Coast & Heaths, Surrey Hills, Tamar Valley, Wye Valley.
What This Means When You're Buying
The reason any of this matters to a buyer:
Up until last week, finding all of this required logging into seven different government portals and squinting at Esri map widgets. Now it's a postcode search for free, or a £14.95 PDF that bakes the lot into a single 14-page report.
How We Use This
Every paid Property Report now includes a "Planning & Constraints" page that lists every statutory designation the property is inside, with the polygon name where one exists. Conservation Area: yes/no/which one. AONB: which one. Article 4 direction: yes/no.
It's the same engine that runs the free postcode pages, just exposed at address granularity.
If you've been avoiding doing the planning research because it's tedious, this is what we built to remove the excuse.
→ Try it: search a postcode (free) · search an address (£14.95)