Southwark Industrial Audit Methodology
The methodology used to collect and analyse data on industrial functional units in Southwark 2019.
A small group of researchers went out into the London Borough of Southwark in Summer 2019, and visited every industrial Functional Unit in the borough.
We identified which buildings to visit using the GLA 2015 industrial land baseline and associated GIS database from the London Industrial Land Supply & Economy Study 2015. The GLA geographical data showed us the land which had been identified as in industrial use in 2015, and we used these land extents to identify which buildings were located on that land, so which buildings we needed to visit. We divided the whole of Southwark into tiles, with each potentially industrial building we identified labelled with a separate code, we called these ‘Functional Unit Codes’ (FUCs). The FUCs enabled us to record where a single business or organisation occupied several buildings.
The team used EpiCollect, a web application for the generation of forms and freely hosted project websites (using Google’s AppEngine) for mobile data collection. Each researcher took a mobile device, usually their phone, knocked on doors and tried to find someone in each Functional Unit who could answer our questions. They also recorded where the buildings which had formed part of the 2015 GLA industrial baseline had been demolished or were no longer in industrial use (most frequently because they had been redeveloped as residential or mixed use), and recorded where they found industrial uses which did not appear in the 2015 baseline.
The survey was conducted for the whole of LB Southwark with the exception of the Old Kent Road Opportunity Area, which was simultaneously under examination by We Made That in their Old Kent Road Business Survey Update as commissioned by Southwark. We did not survey this area, but instead obtained the data from Southwark and aggregated it with our own, in order to maximise resources for the rest of the borough, for which no data existed.
The data from the Cities Research Group and from We Made That was collated in a database for analysis and distribution, and visualised in an interactive map.
If you might be able to use our data for an impactful project in Southwark or elsewhere, we would love to share it with you. Please contact Dr Jane Clossick j.clossick@londonmet.ac.uk to put in a request.
