Business Mountains

July 2019

I put 2.9 million registered offices on a map.

It shows firms with a registered office in the UK, excluding those with a dormant or non-trading status.

If you're wondering about the spike in the North West, it's Warrington.

A solid reason for this eluded me but some fine explanations were given by the LinkedIn community. The most likely turned out to be a large number of umbrella firms used by contractors to major distributors such as Amazon.

This map is almost entirely inspired by Population Mountains created by Matt Daniels at The Pudding. His was a breathtaking piece of work on a global scale - highly recommended viewing.

Making this visualisation

Data sources:

• Companies House monthly update for the company address data
• NSPL postcode lookup to generate approximate lat/lngs for every address

Tools:

• Snowflake to wrangle the data (because it needed a bit of horsepower)
• Kepler.gl to create the 3D map
• Adobe Photoshop to create the video animation used on social media. (The Kepler interactive map melts most devices so this seemed like the best way to make the viz easily viewable)