The Active Places website allows you to search for sports facilities any where in England by a number of different ways. You can browse an interactive map of the country, search for facilities in your local area, use the name and address of a specific facility to find out more information. Please be aware that this is the first stage in an ambitious project information has been collected on over 50,000 facilities already and more is being added all the time.

The Active Places website contains a comprehensive help index to take you through using the system step by step.

Active Places Power

The Active Places Power website has been developed to provide a planning tool for sports facilities. It has been designed to assist in investment decisions across Government and to help local authorities carry out audits of their sports provision and develop local strategies. It will also help national governing bodies of sport in identifying and planning where they need to improve and invest in facilities for their participants. Active Places Power has a single database that holds information on sports facilities throughout England. It includes local authority leisure facilities, as well as commercial and club sites. Local authorities, national governing bodies of sport, government departments and lottery distributors will also be able to use the information to help guide sports facility investment and strategies.

The site will give users enhanced capabilities for analysing the data on the system. These include standard reports, census data based thematics and a series of push-button analyses (based on the complex modelling functionality developed by the University of Edinburgh) designed to examine the catchments of existing and potential facilities. Active Places Power users will also be able to download the data and add their own to it and use it with their own analysis tools or re-load it into the system for further analysis. The site is password protected and users will be assigned different rights according totheir needs and level of use.

The website has added functionality over that of the live public users site. As well as the current public user functionality of Find Nearest, Facility Finder and Freestyle tools the power user site will contain tools for detailed analysis:

1. Thematic Maps

Users can create thematic maps as a layer that can be displayed with other information for example facility types and subtypes. The three broad types of thematic maps are:

  1. Facility Distribution Map
    This thematic map is based upon the amount of a facility type within a particular area. For example, a map based upon a local authority would display its wards coloured in based upon the amount of Health and Fitness clubs each ward contains.
  2. Statistical Distribution Map
    This thematic allows the user to produce a map based on a particular census data values for an area, e.g. unemployment by wards in a Local Authority.
  3. Rural/Urban Map
    This thematic map uses an ONS classification to distinguish an area as rural or urban.

2. Reports

Users can choose between three different report types based on the Active Places data, with the output produced in table and/or map format.

  1. Facility Summary Report by Location (aggregated)
    This calculates the amount of facilities within a user specified area. For example, if the user picked a Region as the area of interest, the report would show the total number of facilities (by type) per local authority for that Region.
  2. Detailed Report by Facility
    This report lists the details of facilities within a user-defined area. For example, by selecting swimming pools as the facility type and specifying a local authority, the system would return results listing the name and details of all swimming pools in that particular Local Authority.
  3. Local Authority Comparison of Facilities
    Using ONS's corresponding Local Authority matrix, users can compare the amount of facilities they have within their area with that of their 4 most similar Local Authorities as defined by ONS.

3. Advanced Queries

Advanced queries allow the user to search the Active Places database using any combination of predefined criteria. This adds flexibility to the system allowing the user to search for, and find, customised results. For example, the user can build the following query:

Find all Local Authority owned 25m swimming pools with disability access that have a minimum of 5 lanes and have been refurbished in the last 10 years.

4. Strategic Planning Tools

This is the complex modelling functionality for power users that is based upon analyses from Edinburgh University's Facilities Planning Model. There will be 8 different types of analysis and, among other things, it uses population statistics and drive times to calculate supply and demand for sporting facilities. This functionality is relatively advanced and a user guide will accompany its usage.

5. Data Download

Power users can download data subsets (depending on their user rights) to analyse Active Places data on their own computers. This adds flexibility to the website as, if there is a function that Active Places does not offer, users can download the data and perform the task themselves. It also has the benefit that the user can 'hang' their own data onto Active Places data using a common referencing system between the two systems.

The Sport England regions are arranging training courses for power users but online help is available and an Active Places Power-user guide is available as a downloadable PDF file.