Methodology and sources

Business listings

Source: Google Business Profile data, plus details published on the businesses' own websites.

We hold 1,010 listings across one town. A listing is published only when we can attach something to it beyond the name and the address, and one that has nothing is held back rather than published thin.

What this cannot tell you: a business that has never set up a Google profile is invisible to this method, and a business that closed last week may still appear. Opening hours are the owner's own and are wrong more often than anything else on a listing. Treat a listing as a good starting point, not as proof that somebody is open right now.

Ratings and reviews

Source: Google.

We host no reviews. The star rating and the review count shown on a listing are Google's, are labelled as Google's, and link back to Google. We never turn them into a rating of our own for any business, and there is no structured-data rating on any page of this site, because we did not collect those reviews and it would be dishonest to mark them up as though we had. A category page shows an average of the Google ratings of its businesses with ten or more reviews, labelled as Google's: a description of the list, not a rating of anyone.

Where a listing is ordered by rating, the ordering is weighted so that a business with three five-star reviews does not outrank one with four hundred reviews averaging 4.6. That weighting is ours, and it changes the order only, never the rating shown.

Recorded crime

Source: the Home Office, through the data.police.uk API, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Crimes are counted inside the town's real boundary, taken from OpenStreetMap, rather than inside a circle drawn around the town centre. That matters more than it sounds: a radius flatters a large town and penalises a small one.

Rates are per 1,000 residents, using the 2021 Census population for the same boundary.

Each town is compared with its county, counted the same way: every crime recorded inside the county boundary over the same three months, divided by the county's population. The county population comes from Wikidata and can be a more recent year than the town's census figure; each crime page names the year it uses. The county boundary is simplified to 150 points before it goes to the police API, which can move its edge by a short distance.

• Cambridgeshire: the Cambridgeshire County Council area, which does not include Peterborough.

What this cannot tell you: three things, and all three matter.

• It is recorded crime, not crime. An offence nobody reported is not in this data. Reporting rates differ by offence and by area, so a higher figure can mean more crime, or more reporting, or both.
• Locations are anonymised. Every report is snapped to one of a fixed set of points near, deliberately not at, where it happened. Our map shows which parts of a town generate more reports. It never shows an address, and no figure on this site places a crime at a business.
• It runs about two months behind. The Home Office publishes on a lag. Every crime page names the month it is showing, and that month is the one to quote, not today's date.

A town-level crime count is a blunt instrument. It is useful for comparing one town against another on the same basis and for seeing whether a trend is going up or down. It is not useful for deciding whether a particular street is safe, and we would rather say so than let the map imply otherwise.

Petrol and diesel prices

Source: Fuel Finder, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero's own aggregation. Since the Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025 every forecourt in the United Kingdom must publish its prices and update them within 30 minutes of a change, so this is the whole market rather than a sample of it.

Every forecourt within ten miles of the town centre is shown, with the date its retailer last moved each price. A price that has not changed in over 14 days is shown with that date but left out of the cheapest prices and every average, because a stale price sitting beside today's supermarket price would mislead.

The United Kingdom averages are our own arithmetic over every forecourt in the feed, not a figure quoted from anywhere else. They are simple averages of the published pump price: a village forecourt counts the same as a motorway service area, so they compare what is on the signs rather than what the market paid.

What this cannot tell you: what you will actually pay. Fuel Finder carries the published price and not a loyalty scheme, a supermarket voucher or a discount, so the pump can be cheaper. Prices are a snapshot taken when this site was last built; the page says when, and each price says when its retailer last changed it.

Bin collections

Source: the district council's own waste and recycling pages, read on the date shown on each bins page. The facts are restated in our own words and every section links to the council page it came from.

What this cannot tell you: your collection day, which depends on your address and is only available from the council's lookup. Services change, so the council's page is the one to trust if it disagrees with ours.

Transport

Source: NaPTAN, the Department for Transport's register of public transport access points, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Active stops inside the town boundary are shown. NaPTAN gives British National Grid positions, which are converted to latitude and longitude with the Ordnance Survey's method and checked against an independent position for the railway station before anything is published.

What this cannot tell you: routes or times. Those need feeds that require a registered key, so the transport page links to Traveline and National Rail instead.

Local news

Source: Google News, which links to each publisher.

We keep headlines from the last three months that name the town or a place in it, and when several outlets tell the same story we keep one. Each headline opens through Google News, which passes you on to the publisher. We hold none of the articles.

Food hygiene ratings

Source: the Food Standards Agency's Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The rating itself is given by the district council that inspected the business.

A rating appears on a business's own listing only when we are sure it belongs to that business. A rating is matched when the postcode is the same and the names agree, or when the names are identical and the two positions are within 150 metres. Anything less certain is checked by hand, and each of those decisions is recorded with the reason for it. A name on its own is not enough, because two businesses can share a building, and a shop, its cafe and its petrol station can share a postcode and a name. The one exception is decided by hand: a home business the Food Standards Agency lists with no address, whose distinctive name appears once in the same council area.

Where the Food Standards Agency lists a business under a different name, such as the caterer that runs a school kitchen, the listing says so. Where the rating is for the cafe or restaurant inside somewhere else, such as a leisure centre, it says that too. An exemption from the scheme is shown only on businesses that sell food.

What this cannot tell you: how the business is doing today. A rating describes what the inspector found on the day of the inspection, which each listing shows, and a business can improve or slip after it. The Food Standards Agency does not publish an address for some businesses, usually home and mobile caterers, so a few ratings cannot be placed on a map at all. If a rating is on the wrong business, tell us and we will take it off.

Town boundaries

Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.

Used to decide what counts as being in a town. A business, a forecourt or a bus stop counts when it is inside the boundary or within 250 metres of it, which allows for a pin that lands just over a line drawn through fields without taking in the next village. Crime is counted on the boundary itself, because its rate is divided by the population living inside it. Where OpenStreetMap's boundary disagrees with what a local would call the town, OpenStreetMap wins, because a consistent rule applied everywhere beats a better rule applied in one place.

Population

Source: the 2021 Census, through Wikidata.

Used only to turn crime counts into rates. The 2021 figure is the most recent official one for these boundaries and it is now several years old, so a town that has grown quickly since will show a rate slightly higher than the truth.

Photographs

Source: Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence. Every photograph's photographer, source and licence are on the image credits page, which each picture links to.

Listings are different. A listing shows a photograph only where the business publishes one on its own website, and otherwise its logo from its Google profile. Both are copies, stored and resized on this site and fetched again every two months, so a picture removed at its source is removed here too.

How often this is updated

We update crime figures and news by hand when new data is out. Listings are refreshed a town at a time when that town is revisited. Documents like this one carry the date they were last reviewed, changed by hand when the content actually changes. Data pages carry the date their figures were fetched, and each listing the date its details were last refreshed from Google. None of them is the day the site happened to be built, because a date that moves on its own tells you nothing.

• Recorded crime: Monthly, about two months behind
• Town boundaries: Refreshed when a town is added
• Bus stops and stations: Monthly
• Bus routes and timetables: Daily
• Local headlines: Daily
• Bin collections: Checked by hand
• NHS organisation register: Weekly. Postcodes are placed with the ONS Postcode Directory, which contains OS data, Crown copyright and database right.
• Food hygiene ratings: Weekly
• Fuel Finder: On every rebuild; retailers must update within 30 minutes
• Station facts: Daily

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it or say why we have not. Corrections go to hello@nearbyuk.com and reach Ben Criddle, who is accountable for what this site publishes. A business that wants its own listing changed can say so the same way.