The creative economy here, by the numbers

What these numbers are, and what they are not

Nobody publishes a count of the creative businesses in a council area, because the register that would contain them does not exist. Companies House knows about companies. HMRC knows about taxpayers but publishes nothing. A sole trader who has never registered anything appears in no list at all, which is exactly the population that local funding decisions most often overlook. This directory assembles that list, so these figures cover ground that official statistics do not.

That also means they should be read with their limits in view:

• There is no turnover here, and there cannot be. Small companies file abridged accounts under the Companies Act 2006, and turnover appears in barely one filing in a hundred. Any directory quoting revenue for businesses this size is estimating it. We do not.
• Employee counts understate reality. The figure filed is an average of employees under contract. A studio running on five regular freelancers files a one. Treat it as a floor, not a headcount.
• Only companies file accounts. The sole traders — the majority of this directory and the whole reason it exists — file nothing public. They are counted here but contribute no financial figures.
• Small groups are suppressed. Where fewer than 5 businesses would go into a figure, we do not publish it. A median across two businesses tells each of them the other's balance sheet.

The measure used below is balance-sheet total — total assets before deducting liabilities. It is the one size measure that is actually present in the filings, and it is what Companies House itself uses to decide whether a company counts as micro, small or medium.

The map

One dot per published listing, placed at postcode level. No name travels with a dot: many makers work from home, and this site publishes council area and ward rather than addresses. What the picture is for is the shape — where creative work concentrates, and where it thins out.

Counts per council area are in the table below, which is the accurate version of the same thing.

Where they are

Postcodes do not respect council boundaries. Roughly one business in twelve with a Southampton postcode sits in Test Valley or Eastleigh, which is why every record here is attributed to a local authority district rather than to the town on its address.

Typical size by craft

Median balance-sheet total for the companies in each craft that have filed accounts we could read. Half of businesses sit above the median and half below, which makes it a far more useful figure than an average that one large company can distort.

The spread across all of them

Half of the businesses with published accounts sit inside the shaded band. The line is the median. Highest and lowest are deliberately not drawn — in a sample this size they are the two least reliable numbers in it, and plotting them would give the outlier the most visual weight.

Filing punctuality

Of 1,200 companies whose filing history we checked, 77 filed their most recent accounts after the deadline and 16 are currently overdue.

Late filing is common and usually means an overstretched founder rather than a failing business — but the penalties escalate and the record is public. If yours is showing as late, the guide on running a company covers what that costs.

Craft by craft