Rural Urban Classification (2003) of CAS Wards in England and Wales

Published by:
Office for National Statistics
Last updated:
20 September 2023
Topic:
Not added
Licence:
None

Summary

This file provides a rural-urban view of 2003 Census Area Statistics (CAS) Wards in England and Wales. The ZIP file contains the Rural Urban Classification in XLSX and CSV format and includes a user guide. The files were originally from the NeSS website. Click on the Download button to download the ZIP file.


The classification of rural and urban areas is the outcome of a project co-sponsored by:
  • Office for National Statistics (ONS);
  • Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra);
  • Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now Communities and Local Government);
  • Countryside Agency (CA); and
  • National Assembly for Wales (NAW).
The classification was developed in 2004 by a consortium co-ordinated by Prof. John Shepherd from Birkbeck College. The technical work was lead by Peter Bibby of University of Sheffield and the project also involved the University of Glamorgan and Geowise. The rural and urban classification of Output Areas, Super Output Areas and Wards (this dataset) has been provided to enable datasets to be analysed according to the classification. This provides a powerful tool for the development and monitoring of rural and urban policies.

Please Note: Wards do not have all the same classification codes as the OA level Dataset. For Wards and SOAs the classifications for ‘Villages, Hamlets and Isolated Dwellings’ has been combined.

Similar procedures to those used to classify Output Areas apply to the classification for the 8,850 CAS Wards in England and Wales. However the morphological classification differs in the number of categories as very few wards can be classified as predominantly dispersed settlements. Wards are categorised into just three domains: urban 10k, town and fringe and villages, hamlets and isolated dwellings. See key below:

2005 Rural and Urban morphology indicator
1 - denotes predominantly urban >10k
2 - denotes predominantly town and fringe
3 - denotes other rural (including village, hamlet and isolated dwellings)

2005 Rural and Urban context indicator
0 - denotes less sparsely populated areas
1 - denotes sparsely populated areas

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