Data licence

Venue names, locations, addresses, opening hours and facility tags on this site come from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0. Individual venue pages link back to the specific OpenStreetMap object they describe.

City names, population figures and coordinates come from Wikidata, released under CC0.

Closure checks, and contact details shown in a clearly labelled "also recorded elsewhere" block, come from the Overture Maps Foundation places theme, licensed under CDLA-Permissive-2.0 and Apache-2.0. The Overture places theme contains no OpenStreetMap data and carries no share-alike obligation.

We use two sources that describe the same kind of thing — places — and we deliberately do not merge them:

• Every venue that has a page on this site comes from OpenStreetMap. No Overture-only place is ever given a page, and no Overture value is written into an OpenStreetMap field.
• Overture records are stored in separate tables. They are used to answer one question — has this business permanently closed? — and to show contact details OpenStreetMap does not have, in a separate block that names its source.
• Consequently each field on a page comes wholly from one dataset. That is what makes the combination a Collective Database under ODbL §4.5(a), rather than a single merged Derived Database that would pull the Overture data into share-alike.

The ODbL offer above therefore covers the OpenStreetMap-derived tables. Overture data is available directly from Overture Maps under its own licence.

Our venue store is a Derived Database under the ODbL, and these pages are a Produced Work. Because the Produced Work is publicly used, the ODbL entitles you to a machine-readable copy of the Derived Database, under ODbL, at no charge.

We make no substantial changes to the underlying OpenStreetMap data: our records are a filtered subset, keyed by OpenStreetMap object ID. If you want the complete upstream dataset rather than our subset, take it directly from OpenStreetMap or from Geofabrik's extracts.

Our own material — rankings and scores, the scoring rules themselves, editorial text, page layout, design and code — is not part of the Derived Database and is not licensed under the ODbL. It is stored separately from the OpenStreetMap-sourced fields, which keeps the combination a Collective Database under ODbL §4.5(a).

We do not merge our own venue records into the OpenStreetMap-derived tables, and we do not deduplicate a second venue source against them.

The same applies to what readers send us. Reports submitted through the form on a venue page live in their own table, keyed to a venue but never written back into it, and they are shown on the page under their own heading rather than mixed into the mapped facts. Two reasons, and both matter: the OpenStreetMap extract stays clean for the share-alike offer above, and a reader who told us a room is quiet has not agreed to license anything under the ODbL. Reader reports are not included in the database dump we will supply on request.

Errors in venue data are best fixed at source: edit the venue in OpenStreetMap and the correction reaches this site on the next refresh, along with every other service using the same data. For anything else, get in touch.