Population24/7

Population24/7 is an approach to spatiotemporal population modelling developed by researchers at the University of Southampton, originally with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, award ES/G031304/1. The work is being further developed with ESRC funding as Population247NRT: Near real-time spatiotemporal population estimates for health, emergency response and national security award ES/P010768/1.  The downloadable data on this site have been updated to include outputs generated during the Population247NRT project, which have also been deposited with the UK Data Service as http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853950

Conventional population mapping relies heavily on data from censuses and other sources that count people at their residential addresses. The resulting maps are therefore essentially maps of the 'night-time' population. In reality however, population is highly dynamic, with continual redistribution over temporal cycles such as working days, weeks and terms as population shifts between locations of (for example) home, work, education and leisure activities. We have developed an approach to the modelling of these time-specific population distributions which is based on the integration of data from a range of sources and is implemented using our SurfaceBuilder247 .NET software with a structured library of georeferenced population data sources. From these pages you can download the software and documentation and also sample data for England and Wales using open data referenced to the date of the 2011 census.

We have published several open access journal papers based on this work - see FAQ for more:

A paper which sets out the Population24/7 approach

Martin,D., Cockings, S. and Leung, S. (2015) Developing a flexible framework for spatiotemporal population modelling Annals of the Association of American Geographers doi:10.1080/00045608.2015.1022089

On this site you can

Use the tabs to find out more about us and the Population24/7 modelling project, Download sample model outputs or the SurfaceBuilder247 software and documentation

Version 2-0 is a fully open version, with all input datasets and any derived output datasets being available for re-use under the Open Government Licence or Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Data citation Martin, D., Cockings, S. Harfoot, A., Smith, A. D. (2021) Population24/7: an open gridded population dataset for England and Wales. GeoData, University of Southampton.

Data acknowledgements

The Data Collection is available to any user without the requirement for registration for download/access. Contains data from the Office for National Statistics, Royal Mail and NHS Digital licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Original data remain under Crown copyright, Royal Mail, NHS Digital and HESA copyright.