As part of the DCMS Culture and Heritage Capital project, Groundwork London was commissioned in early 2021 to create a database of cultural and heritage assets in England.

Following a review of the terms culture and heritage, carried out by heritage experts Dr. N. Hutcheson and M. Tomiak, 7 culture and heritage categories were identified.

The GDS Team worked to collate information from various organizations such as Historic England, Arts Council England, Ordnance Survey Points of Interest, Visit England, National Trust.

The database featured historic landmarks belonging to the English culture and heritage like museums, listed buildings, scheduled monuments, cinemas, theatres, and many others. A single record could be linked to multiple categories (for instance a museum that is also a listed building and hosts Visual Arts activities) where relevant and data could be extracted by the client in a spatially enabled format.

A spatially enabled PostgreSQL database was created to store the data within an adequate schema and a workflow was outlined to carry out complex tasks:

• Matching newly imported records with existing data by attributes and spatial location
• Merging attributes between records obtained from different datasets
• Fetching unique identifiers from Address Base data (UPRN, USRN, TOID)