The Food Standards Agency register
268 listings are published today. The largest single source among them is the Food Standards Agency’s food hygiene rating register, read for the local authority the FSA calls Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. That authority covers exactly the area this directory covers.
The register is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse and requires attribution. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Each imported listing names the Food Standards Agency as its source and links to its own entry on the FSA register, so you can read the original record beside ours.
The rest were written here: places researched from their own published pages or from the council’s, and Sandbanks Digital’s own listing and those of its clients. Each names its source in the same place. Parks, beaches and shops are not on a food register and never will be, so anything that is not a food business reached this directory that way.
What was taken from the register
Trading name, address, postcode, the coordinate the register holds, the premises type the council filed the business under, and the food hygiene rating with the date it was awarded.
The register holds no telephone number, website, email address, opening hours, photograph or description, so an imported listing starts without them and stays that way until an owner adds them or we research them. The one-line summary on an imported listing is written here from the category and the place. Nothing descriptive is copied.
Premises in the register that are not listed here
The register lists premises that handle food, which is not the same set as places a member of the public can walk into and buy something, so most of what it holds for this authority was left behind. Left out: school, college and university kitchens; care homes, nurseries and day centres; distributors and transporters; manufacturers and packers; importers and exporters; growers and wholesale producers. Left out as well is the register’s “other catering premises” heading, which mixes contract caterers, workplace canteens, church halls, lunch clubs and people cooking in their own kitchens, and holds no field that separates them.
Institutions are also removed by name and by address wherever the council filed them under something else, so a staff canteen, a church hall or a shop inside a hospital does not appear as somewhere to eat or shop.
Addresses we do not print
The register records that food is handled at an address. It does not record whether that address is a shop or somebody’s home, and a council has one drop-down for both, so a person icing cakes in their own kitchen can arrive filed as a restaurant with the street they live on attached.
A street address is therefore published only when something positively identifies premises the public can walk into: the kind of business it is (a pharmacy, a butcher, a named pub, a hotel), an address that names commercial premises (a unit, a parade, a precinct, an industrial estate), or another entry in the register at the same full postcode, because a parade holds several food businesses and a house holds one. Where there is no such evidence the street line is withheld. Absent evidence is not a judgement about any particular business, and it is the safer way to be wrong.
Withholding costs a line, not a listing: the name, category, area, postcode and an approximate map point all remain. Imported listings that publish no street address for this reason are marked as such on the listing itself, as are businesses published as serving an area rather than trading from premises the public can visit, which have no public address to print.
Food hygiene ratings
94 published listings show a food hygiene rating from 0 to 5. The rest show none, either because they are not food businesses at all or because the register records them as exempt, which is mostly shops handling only pre-packed food, or as awaiting a first inspection. A listing with no score simply omits the section rather than showing an empty one.
A hygiene rating is the council’s judgement of the standards its food safety officers found when they last inspected. It is not a review, it is not our opinion of the food, and it is kept out of the BCP Directory rating entirely: only approved reviews written by readers here count towards that score. Every score is shown with the date it was awarded, and a score old enough to have outlived its reinspection cycle says so on the listing instead of being shown as though it were current.
How often the register is read again
A job re-reads the register once a week and updates the listings that came from it, so a change of name, address or hygiene rating reaches the page. It refreshes what is already here and does not add premises: a new listing is a new page nobody has read yet, so importing one is a decision a person makes.
A refresh never overwrites work a person has done. Once an owner has edited a listing, an administrator has corrected it, or it has been claimed, archived or merged into another listing, the weekly run leaves its content alone and only records that the register was read again. A listing whose source has not been confirmed for twelve months stops being fit to offer to a search engine until it is checked again.
What we do not copy
We do not bulk copy Google Maps listings, Google reviews, copyrighted descriptions or images without a suitable licence. A map link is provided for navigation, not as a source database.
Coordinates and maps
Almost every coordinate here came from the register with the listing, and each one is validated against the BCP area before it is stored. Premises may use a precise point. Mobile and home-based businesses use an approximate point, rounded to about a hundred metres, so a private address is not exposed; those listings say on the page that the map area is approximate. Address searches inside our own editing tools, and the maps on this site, are served by OpenStreetMap.
Owner updates and corrections
A verified owner update takes priority over an automated import. We retain source dates and edit history so later refreshes do not silently overwrite owner-maintained fields. Corrections from local users are checked before they are applied, and anyone can suggest one whether or not they own the business.