Britain’s travel-to-work areas sorted two ways: by economic function (from global financial capitals to coastal and post-industrial towns) and by population trajectory (growing, stable, or declining). Each cell of the grid is the enquiry-weighted average of a chosen search-flow index for the areas of that type, before (2016–2019), during (2020–2021), and after (2022–2025) the pandemic. Search signals interest rather than a completed move, and England is the reliable canvas.
The grids are laid out so that change reads by scanning, not by memory: the three periods sit side by side as columns, the sale and rental markets as two stacked bands, all on one colour scale. Choose an index once and it applies throughout. The Levels view shows each period’s state; the Change view replaces the periods with the two step changes (during minus before, after minus during) on a diverging scale, so a cell that moved lights up (teal for a rise, terracotta for a fall) and a cell that held steady stays pale. Net-flow runs from −1 to +1 and marks whether more search arrives than departs; the leaving rate, openness, reach, and concentration describe how far and how widely residents look. The clearest pattern is an affordability gradient in the sale market that the rental market does not share: growing capitals and core cities are sale sources yet rental sinks, while declining core cities lose demand under both tenures.