Aims: Food desert literature started out attempting to understand spatial patterns of poor health outcomes Firstly, from access to food stores, as the 1980s observed food stores moving to edge-of-town shopping centres, and secondly, from impacts upon diets by food stores. This created a culturally perceived understanding of underserviced urban areas lacking food stores, access and availability. The literature morphed into critical evidence bases to pinpoint the causation of unequal health outcomes and effective solutions, from diet, nutrition, education, income, access, and motivation, all to disputing food deserts’ existence in the UK. In the last three decades of food desert literature, a few studies have attempted the spatiotemporal aspect of food store development and less alongside an index domain variable. Therefore, the current study aims to explore the spatiotemporal development of food stores from 1973-2022 in Lincoln (UK) a medium-sized city and the spatiotemporal relationship with IMD’s income domain from 2004-2019.
Methods: Datasets available for food stores were by the Ordnance Survey or Geolytix, both containing no temporal data, only currently operational food stores. This required a novel data collection approach using dozens of physical and online directories, once synthesised the FS database spanned from 1973 to 2022. All issues of the index of multiple deprivations (IMD) income domain were combined, alongside the FS database various data and spatial analysis used geographical information systems (GIS) and excel, resulting in three graphs and twelve maps.
Results: The literature indicates conventional food deserts of geo-access do not exist in the UK, this was observed in Lincoln as food store access meets the new 15-minute city concept. However, food deserts are better understood when re-framed to group or individual-scale food deserts, whereby a food desert exists for a certain group but not others within the same area. Furthermore, areas with no food store history displayed the least income deprivation, as long-term trends show food store closures are most likely in high-income deprived areas. Moreover, small food stores displayed a very high turnover rate, as 66% of all identified small store locations closed over 50 years.
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