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Open Innovations is winding down and will no longer be commencing new work from May 2026.

Warm spaces during winter 2023

Last year, as fuel bills soared, many councils and other organisations started creating directories of warm space offers. Ideally none of this would be needed. But it was. And the multiplication of directories, together with the large page sizes, wasn't necessarily great for those who actually needed to find warm spaces. So we started an unfunded project to collate the offers from these directories.

The aim was to prioritise the time, bandwidth requirements, and privacy of those in need. Effectively, we created a simple search engine for warm space offers. We also created a map interface for those less worried about bandwidth. By the time we reached the spring, our search tool was indexing over 13,500 offers across 135 directories.

During the warmer months many of the directories wound-down, were removed, or were left to get stale. Recently, in preparation for this winter, we started going through our big list of directories to update links and check if our scrapers were still working. It turns out councils like to move their websites around and totally change how they are built so there has been quite a bit of work for me to do. There have also been some casualties of council mergers with a few broken indexes on new websites. Despite all that, we've managed to index over 9,500 offers from 122 different directories. Not quite the level of last year yet but many councils say they are still updating their directories.

If you know of any directories that we are missing, please do let us know. If you have a warm space to offer, please find an appropriate directory in our list and add your offer to one of them.

Getting the data

Almost every directory does things differently and very few publish machine readable data. To create a consistent search interface most of the effort has been in trying to bring it all together in a standardised, machine readable, way (and trying to parse hundreds of ways people hand write opening hours). That has involved creating 100 customised scraping scripts and tweaking these each time a council changes how they format their HTML.

As well as making the search tools, we also publish the data. Whilst we may not have every offer that exits in the UK, we have most comprehensive look at the picture across the country. So we publish a JSON file with all the warm space offers and a JSON file with information about the directories which may be useful for groups trying to identify gaps in provision.

For the warm space offers, here are the fields that may be present:

  • _source - a key to represent the directory the offer is listed in
  • address - as much of an address as is provided
  • description - general text about the offer and facilities provided
  • hours - this is broken down into the original text (_text) and a parsed version presented in the OpenStreetMaps opening hours format (opening)
  • lat - the latitude of the offer
  • lon - the longitude of the offer
  • lon_pcd - a boolean flag to indicate if the lat and lon were calculated using the postcode in the address.
  • title - the name of the organisation/offer