Place+ is a digital placemaking platform that supports more informed, collaborative and strategic decision-making in shaping towns, cities and regions.
Developed by placemakers and digital innovators at Prior + Partners, it brings together spatial intelligence, data science, and placemaking expertise within a single integrated environment.
Rooted in our experience delivering complex projects across the globe, it reflects a simple belief: technology should support placemaking, not replace it — creating space for clearer thinking, stronger collaboration and better outcomes for people and place.
The National Place Portrait is the first tool within the wider Place+ platform.
Free to access, it brings together essential datasets into a single interactive view of place conditions across England and Wales. It enables users across the public and private sector to understand how places are changing, and respond with greater clarity and confidence.
It transforms fragmented public datasets into a structured set of thematic views, allowing users to explore place conditions through a consistent spatial framework. Rather than searching across multiple sources, users can move between themes, scales and locations in one place.
The National Place Portrait is designed to support early-stage analysis and strategic decision-making — helping teams identify patterns, compare places, and focus attention where it is most needed.
The growing complexity of planning and placemaking means decisions increasingly rely on interpreting large and varied datasets — but the current process of doing so is often slow, fragmented and resource-intensive. As government and industry work towards major housing and infrastructure targets, this creates delays in moving from evidence to action.
The National Place Portrait supports a shift away from this by making spatial evidence easier to access, compare and apply in practice. It reduces the time spent navigating and reconciling data, allowing teams to focus more on interpretation, strategy and delivery.
For public sector organisations, this supports policy development, prioritisation of investment, and more effective engagement with stakeholders. For private sector teams, it enables faster identification of opportunities, stronger site understanding, and more responsive masterplanning.
For Prior + Partners, this is about improving the quality of the work that underpins placemaking — creating more space for joined-up thinking, better collaboration, and more confident decision-making in the shaping of places.
The National Place Portrait brings together datasets from sources including the Office for National Statistics, DEFRA, the Department for Transport, Historic England, Natural England and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities.
The tool then structures this information into a series of 2D and 3D thematic dashboards that organise data by topic and geography.
Users can move between national, regional, local authority and neighbourhood scales, and switch between themes such as environment, housing, infrastructure and health. Themes can also be viewed together to explore relationships between different datasets.
The platform includes comparative views across places, allowing users to review differences and track change over time.
The National Place Portrait will continue to evolve with new datasets and enhanced multi-layer visualisation, helping users better understand where pressures and opportunities overlap.
Future advanced functionality will include presentation-ready outputs, downloadable data (including GIS and Excel formats), and personalised AI-powered workspaces to support ongoing analysis and project work.
While the Place Portrait provides a free entry point into Place+, it also forms the foundation for a wider toolkit used in bespoke planning and masterplanning projects. Combined with Prior + Partners’ consultancy work, this enables deeper scenario testing, tailored analysis, and place-specific strategy development.
To learn more about Place+ and arrange a demo, contact placeplus@priorpartners.com
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Place+ has been developed by Prior + Partners, a masterplanning, planning and economics practice. To learn more about our consultancy visit www.priorandpartners.com