PharmSee's city-core pharmacy atlas has tracked eight English mid-tier cities branch-by-branch: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Plymouth, Sheffield. Nottingham was the last unmapped city — cycle 10 measured its headline density, but no full branch-level composition existed.

Cycle 19 closes the gap. NG1 5DT 3-mile ring returns 89 pharmacies, 65 GP practices, and a 0.73 GP-to-pharmacy ratio — comfortably below parity. Nottingham is pharmacy-dense, not pharmacy-thin. The branch-level composition is what the atlas was missing:

The full chain composition (cycle 19)

The 76% independent share

Nottingham's NG1 independent share sits at 76.4% (68 of 89 branches, 83.8% of operating branches). This lands Nottingham in the upper half of the urban independent-share table, between Sheffield (69.4%) and Birmingham (85.2%).

The cycle 15 finding that "no English city core has a chain-majority community pharmacy sector" is now confirmed across nine cities. Every single city in the atlas is independent-majority. The lowest (Plymouth 58.5%) is still 10 points above chain-parity. The Nottingham datapoint strengthens the case: the chain-dominated narrative doesn't match ground-truth branch composition anywhere.

Peak Pharmacy's Nottingham outpost

Peak Pharmacy — the 170-branch Derbyshire regional chain PharmSee profiled in cycle 5 — has three contractor codes in the Nottingham NG1 3mi ring, of which only one is operating. The operating branch runs £114,240, above the independent average and above the Boots average. The two Peak ghosts represent a 67% chain-specific ghost rate — higher than Nottingham Boots (36%), lower than Nottingham Lloyds (100%).

Peak's commercial footprint is centred on Derbyshire, not Nottinghamshire. Three NG1 contractor codes is a thin Nottingham outpost — the one operating site is productive, but the chain has not meaningfully extended south of the Derbyshire border into Nottingham itself. Any "Peak dominates the East Midlands" framing needs to be qualified against this datapoint.

The Boots footprint — mid-moderate cluster

Nottingham Boots runs 11 contractor codes, 7 operating, 4 ghost — a 36.4% ghost rate that places it in the moderate cluster between the clean Southern cities and the half-closed North. Operating revenue average is £109,595 — above Boots Liverpool (£102,970), Boots Bristol (£66,256) and Boots Manchester (£76,241). Nottingham's Boots core is commercially healthy.

This is the city where the "Boots estate bimodality" pattern doesn't cleanly apply. The ghost rate is mid-range, the operating revenue is above-average, and the independent challenger share is the second-highest in the atlas. Nottingham is the city where chains and independents coexist at healthy revenue levels, rather than competing in a zero-sum way.

Zero-Lloyds — full ghost

Four Lloyds contractor codes, zero operating. Nottingham is the seventh city in PharmSee's atlas where Lloyds's community pharmacy presence is 100% ghost. The Newcastle NE1 2-branch survival (cycle 19 highlight) is the only city-core exception. For Nottingham, Lloyds is an artefact of the register, not a competitor.

One Asda, one Tesco, one supermarket story

Supermarket pharmacy in Nottingham is two Asda branches (FSK33 and FTJ90, avg £67,648) plus one Tesco branch (FCH51, NG9 2WJ, £53,062 — the Beeston university-dormitory site from PharmSee's Tesco 9-city geography piece). Morrisons has no NG1 3mi pharmacy presence.

The Nottingham supermarket pharmacy tier is notably weaker than most atlas cities: Tesco NG9 sits in the Tier 3 £53k bucket, Asda averages below the £90k Nottingham independent average. Supermarket pharmacy is the worst-performing segment of the Nottingham NG1 catchment, which is unusual — in most cities supermarket pharmacies sit mid-tier or better.

The likely explanation: Nottingham's 76% independent share means supermarket pharmacy counters are competing against a dense, well-distributed indie network that independents in chain-dominated cities don't benefit from.

Why this completes the atlas

Nine English city cores now have full branch-level composition data in PharmSee's atlas. The pattern holds: every city is independent-majority, every city has a ghost-rate overhang on Boots and Lloyds, every city has a supermarket pharmacy tier that operates as a distinct economic segment. The Nottingham datapoint reinforces each of these pillars rather than breaking any of them.

The atlas-level "three-chain UK pharmacy market" narrative (Boots + Well + Lloyds) is wrong in every city measured. The correct framing is indies-plus-one-or-two-anchor-chains-per-city, and the anchor chains vary: Boots everywhere, Well in Liverpool, Peak in the East Midlands, Cohens in Greater Manchester. Nottingham shows Boots as the anchor with weak supermarket pharmacy support.

Explore the data

• Nottingham pharmacy search — 89 pharmacies, 65 GP practices
• Peak Pharmacy Derbyshire profile
• Birmingham B1 85% independent share
• PharmSee location analyzer — run your own city-core audit

Methodology

NG1 5DT 3-mile /api/location/analyze pull, cycle 19. Chain classification: Boots / Lloyds / Tesco / Asda / Morrisons by contractor-name prefix; Peak Pharmacy by "PEAK" in contractor name; Independent = everything else (including small regional chains under 5 branches). Operating status cycle 14 convention. The 4-branch Lloyds and 11-branch Boots are both raw NHS Digital register counts before any non-operating filter is applied.