Glossary: Terms and Areas Used on This Site

What the terms on Cheltenham Open Data mean, from how far around Cheltenham each page looks to wards, licences and how fresh the data is.

Glossary

The pages on this site use a few terms in the same way throughout. This page explains what they mean, starting with how far around Cheltenham each page looks.

Town Centre

Every “miles from the town centre” figure, and every search around Cheltenham, is measured in a straight line from one point: Cheltenham town centre (51.8994, -2.0783), on the Promenade.

Distance Bands

Pages that list places around Cheltenham use one of four distances, so that “nearby” means the same thing from page to page.

Town: 4 Miles

Places you would walk, cycle or make a short trip to, across Cheltenham and its edges.

Local: 6 Miles

Cheltenham and the villages and hills around it, such as Bishop’s Cleeve, Shurdington, Leckhampton Hill and Cleeve Hill, stopping short of Gloucester.

Area: 12 Miles

The wider area people travel in from, including Gloucester, Tewkesbury and the nearby Cotswolds.

Drive: 20 Miles

Worth a drive: places people will travel further for, such as cheaper fuel or a different parkrun.

Pages That Follow a Boundary or Fixed Rule

Some pages don’t use a distance band:

  • Crime, wards, deprivation, home energy ratings, elections and council data: the borough of Cheltenham or its wards and neighbourhoods. These are published for official areas rather than by distance.

  • Schools, childcare, GPs and pharmacies, dentists, opticians, care homes and charities: Cheltenham’s postcode districts, GL50 to GL54 (GL50 to GL53 for GPs and pharmacies). These registers are searched by postcode, which covers the town and its villages.

  • River levels and rainfall: river gauges within 6 km and rain gauges within 12 km. Only the gauges on Cheltenham’s own rivers and nearby hills say anything useful about flooding here.

  • Fix My Street: 10 km. FixMyStreet’s own feed sets this.

  • Wildfire risk and history: 10 km. Fire incident records back to 2010 are counted at this distance.

  • Listed buildings: a fixed area covering the town. Historic England’s data is searched by map area rather than distance.

  • Politics: the Cheltenham parliamentary constituency. MPs and general election results are published for the constituency, whose boundary is set separately from the borough’s.

Borough

The area run by Cheltenham Borough Council: the town and the areas around it that have joined the borough over the years, such as Charlton Kings, Leckhampton and Swindon Village. Official statistics for “Cheltenham”, from population to earnings, are usually for the borough.

Ward

The borough is split into 20 wards, the areas that elect borough councillors. See the Cheltenham wards page for a profile of each.

Constituency

The area that elects Cheltenham’s MP. Its boundary is set separately from the borough’s and was last redrawn for the 2024 general election, so general election results and borough statistics may not cover exactly the same streets.

Postcode District

The first half of a postcode. Cheltenham and its nearby villages are covered by GL50, GL51, GL52, GL53 and GL54, and some pages use these to decide what counts as Cheltenham.

Last Updated and Checked

Data that changes slowly says Last updated with the date it was fetched. Data checked every few hours or more often says Checked with how often, such as “Checked every two hours”, because the date would be out of step by the next check.

Open Licences

Most of the data here is published under an open licence that lets anyone reuse it with credit:

  • Open Government Licence (OGL): used by most UK government and public bodies, from the ONS to the Environment Agency.
  • Open Database Licence (ODbL): used by OpenStreetMap, the source of maps and many lists of local places.

Each page names its source and licence under its data, and the terms of use list them all.