Every takeaway and restaurant on the UK's food hygiene register, sorted by what its name says it sells, and mapped per head for every postcode district and county. Where is the chip shop capital? The curry capital? Where do takeaways outnumber restaurants?
Britain's high streets keep a register. Every place that serves food to the public, from the chip shop to the school canteen, is inspected by its council and given a food hygiene rating, and the Food Standards Agency publishes the lot as open data: 614,680 food businesses across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, each with its name, its kind of business, its postcode and, for most, a point on the map.
The register says whether a place is a takeaway or a restaurant. It does not say what it sells. But the names do: Jubilee Fish Bar, Simla Tandoori, Happy Garden, Bosphorus Istanbul. I sorted every takeaway, restaurant, cafe and mobile caterer by its name into sixteen kinds of food with a set of open, checkable rules, tested the rules on hundreds of individually labelled names, compared them with OpenStreetMap's cuisine tags, and counted them against the people who live in each postcode district and county.
Pick a food and the map recolours. Areas with none of that food are palest; the rest are split into six classes with equal numbers of areas, so the darkest class is the top sixth. Two cautions before reading it. First, a postcode district with few residents and a busy high street, a city centre or a seaside resort, will have far more takeaways per head than the people living there could ever eat; switch to "Share of places" to ask what a place's takeaways sell rather than how many there are. Second, about a third of takeaways have names that do not say what they sell (Tasty Bite, Munchies), so every count here is a floor, not a census.
Click a card to put that food on the map. The fish and chip map is a seaside map. The postcode districts with most chip shops per resident are resorts: Skegness, Bridlington, Filey and their neighbours, where the shops serve day trippers as well as residents. Among larger council areas, Blackpool leads, followed by North East Lincolnshire and Walsall. By nation, Wales has the most chip shops per head (17.8 per 100,000, against 12.4 in England and 10.2 in Scotland).
The curry map follows where Britain's South Asian communities settled: west London's Hounslow and Southall, then Westminster and Ealing. The Chinese map does something different. Chinese takeaways spread to almost every town in the decades after the war, so with curry houses they are the most evenly spread of the big foods, and the districts that top the list are the old Chinatowns of the big cities. Kebabs and chicken shops are the most urban and the most southern foods: across counties, the rank correlation between latitude and kebab places per head is −0.41, and for chicken shops −0.38; for Chinese places it is 0.40, more of them per head the further north you go.
Scotland has the most takeaways per head of the four nations (112.4 per 100,000, against 88.0 in England, 99.6 in Wales and 91.2 in Northern Ireland), and more Chinese takeaways and restaurants per head than England. Wales leads on chip shops (17.8 per 100,000) and kebabs, Scotland on curry houses (14.2), and Northern Ireland on pizza (16.1, against 13.7 in England). Northern Ireland and Scotland have the fewest kebab and chicken shops.
Across the UK the register holds 0.45 takeaways for every restaurant or cafe. In only 4 council areas of 100,000 people or more do takeaways outnumber restaurants: North Lanarkshire (1.33 takeaways per restaurant), Rochdale (1.31), Caerphilly (1.06) and Sunderland (1.01), all old industrial places. At the other end are central and west London: Westminster has 0.08 takeaways per restaurant.
Most takeaways are independent. Of 8,651 chip shops, only 48 belong to a chain I could recognise. Burgers are the opposite: McDonald's alone is 40.4% of burger places. Domino's is 14.2% of pizza places, KFC 18.7% of chicken shops, and Subway and Greggs together 33.0% of sandwich shops and bakeries.
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, councils rate hygiene from 0 (urgent improvement necessary) to 5 (very good); Scotland uses Pass or Improvement Required. Takeaways rate lower than restaurants: 61.4% of rated takeaways have a 5, against 75.6% of restaurants and cafes, 77.2% of pubs and 88.4% of mobile caterers. Among takeaways, sushi and Japanese places rate best (85.6% with a 5) and Indian takeaways lowest (44.7%, with 9.7% rated 2 or below). Chain takeaways do much better than independents (84.4% against 58.4% with a 5).
The rules give a kind of food to 65.0% of takeaways, 42.8% of restaurants and cafes and 33.0% of mobile caterers; the rest have names that do not say. To test them, I drew a fresh random sample of 300 businesses after the rules were finished (200 takeaways and 100 restaurants) and each name was labelled individually by reading the name, as part of the AI-assisted analysis, and reviewed by the author, without looking at the rules' answer. Of the names the rules sorted, 96.7% were sorted right (95% interval 93.0 to 98.5%). Of the names that do plainly say what they sell, the rules caught 90.3%; the misses were names like Erawan (Thai) or Chettinad (south Indian) that need outside knowledge.
OpenStreetMap is an independent check. Its volunteers tag many takeaways with a cuisine. I matched 40,512 OpenStreetMap takeaways and restaurants to the register by name and place (within 100 metres). Where both say what the food is, they agree 91.7% of the time. OpenStreetMap also shows what the rules miss: of matched places the rules left unsorted but OpenStreetMap gives a cuisine, the most common are Chinese, Indian and Italian places with names that do not say so. And the two sources draw much the same map: across postcode districts the rank correlation between the two counts per head is 0.74 for chicken shops, 0.60 for pizza and 0.46 for chip shops; lower than perfect because OpenStreetMap is patchier in some places than others.
data/accuracy_sample.csv.Data. The Food Standards Agency's ratings API (version 2), retrieved on 2026-10-28: every establishment of each of the fourteen business types, 614,680 in all, of which 62,949 takeaways and sandwich shops, 141,306 restaurants, cafes and canteens, 50,524 pubs, bars and nightclubs and 31,314 mobile caterers. Scotland's businesses are in the same register under the Food Hygiene Information Scheme. 82.1% of these businesses have a map point; the rest are counted through their postcode and council.
Names. A set of keyword rules, in code/classify.py, reads each name: national chains first, then strong words (fish bar, chippy, tandoori, kebab, pizza, chinese), and only when nothing strong fires, weaker hints (dragon, golden, spice). A name with two strong families (Fish Bar and Chinese) goes to the first in a fixed order. Pubs are not sorted. The rules do not read menus, so a curry house called The Rose stays unsorted.
People. Postcode districts: Census 2021 usual residents (England and Wales, ONS table P004; Northern Ireland, NISRA) and Scotland's Census 2022 postcode counts summed by district (NRS). Counties and unitary authorities: ONS mid-2025 population estimates, ONS boundaries of December 2023. Each business takes the county of its inspecting council, which sits inside one county or unitary authority.
Areas. There are no official postcode district boundaries, so I drew my own: each 750 metre square of land takes the district most common among its nearest food businesses and Scottish census postcodes. Edges are approximate; the counts are not, because every business keeps its own postcode. 2,802 of 2,820 districts with residents are drawn; the rest are tiny central districts, counted but too small to show.
Names as published. 111 business names containing en or em dashes are written with plain hyphens in the published files.
Limits. The register is a register of inspected premises, not of shops open today. Councils assign business types differently. Mobile caterers are registered where their owner is based, so they are left off the maps. A takeaway in a resort or a city centre serves visitors and workers as well as residents. Kitchens that only deliver ("dark kitchens") and several brands run from one kitchen appear as one or several entries depending on how they registered.