Richmond and Wandsworth Council have been working with LDC to inform their Night Time Strategy, and support future applications for funding and interventions towards improvements. They used a bespoke dataset from us alongside their internal data to build an in-depth picture of their high streets at night.
The council wanted to understand how its workers, residents and visitors experience different areas at night, with a particular focus on personal safety— how the absence of open shops or good lighting, for example, may make walking in certain areas after dark an uncomfortable experience for many.
They needed a dynamic, visual way to represent how quiet some areas become at night, and how that may contribute to a lack of safety. They combined LDC data with their internal dataset to create a map showing where businesses were open and closed at different points of the night.
The ability to separate different retail and leisure categories proved especially important for the council, highlighting 24-hour services and understanding the amenities available to night-time workers such as healthy food outlets, nurseries and healthcare facilities. We can offer flexibility in terms of format, tailoring data delivery to suit different use cases and integrations with existing systems and datasets.
Richmond and Wandsworth Council were ultimately successful in securing funding from the government and have since been able to experiment with different ways of consulting and engaging digitally, supported by a detailed custom dataset to provide a precise foundation of evidence.
"LDC was able to provide us with a dataset we couldn’t find elsewhere. Building an idea of what the borough’s high streets look like after dark, and where places are activated (and where they are not) during the course of the night is an essential part of the evidence base for our project. We were grateful they could help!"
Blanka Hay
Local Growth Manager
Richmond and Wandsworth Council
More information can be found about Richmond and Wandsworth's Night Time Strategy here.