PharmSee's cycle 19 thirteen-city Boots audit produced a new atlas leader, and it is not a city most industry observers would guess. Wolverhampton WV1 runs a 57.1% Boots ghost rate — four of seven contractor codes in the 3-mile city-core ring are zero-revenue shells. That beats Newcastle NE1 (52.9%), Liverpool L1 (50%), Leeds LS1 (50%) and Plymouth PL1 (40%).

The surprise is not that Wolverhampton is high — PharmSee's Newcastle and Liverpool cycles already flagged the North-of-England exit pattern. The surprise is that Wolverhampton belongs in that cluster at all. Cycle 16 catalogued Birmingham B1 1BB as the atlas's Boots weak spot, and the assumption was that the West Midlands under-performance was a city-core effect specific to Birmingham. Cycle 19 showed otherwise: the wider conurbation has a different signature again, and Wolverhampton is the sharp end of it.

The seven contractor codes

PharmSee's /api/location/analyze?postcode=WV1+1RT&radiusMiles=3 returns 67 pharmacies, 89 GP practices, and a 1.33 GP-to-pharmacy ratio. The seven Boots contractor codes in the ring:

Three operating branches, four zero-revenue shells. The operating average is £137,265 — higher than Liverpool L1 (£102,970), Leeds LS1 (£63,048) and Manchester M1 (£76,241). Only Plymouth PL1 (£150,572) runs a higher per-branch operating average in the atlas.

The "heavy rationalisation, strong residuals" signature

This is the cleanest example in PharmSee's data of a particular Boots signature: heavy rationalisation + strong survivors. The same pattern appears in Plymouth (40% ghost / £150,572), Newcastle (52.9% / £122,588) and — less extreme — Nottingham (36.4% / £109,595). The closures are not happening to struggling branches; they are happening to overlapping coverage, leaving the strongest neighbourhood branches in place.

Compare to the alternative signature — Birmingham B1 1BB — which runs 25% ghost, £55,435 operating average. That is mid-rationalisation with active closure exposure on top of the existing overhang. Birmingham is where the next register updates will happen; Wolverhampton is where they already happened.

The three survivors

The three operating Wolverhampton branches cluster geographically:

• FKY89 (WV1 3ER, 0.19 mi from centre) — the city-centre branch. £154,185 revenue is the largest in the Wolverhampton Boots footprint and puts FKY89 in the top quartile of operating Boots branches across the whole thirteen-city atlas.
• FG043 (WV3 7LF, 0.62 mi) — west of the centre toward Compton. £142,971 revenue. This is the neighbourhood branch serving the WV3 residential catchment.
• FH473 (WV11 1BP, 1.78 mi) — north-east toward Wednesfield. £114,639 revenue. Wednesfield is a separate sub-town with its own GP catchment, so this branch isn't cannibalising FKY89 or FG043.

The three-branch footprint is a textbook Boots rationalisation end-state: one city-centre, one west neighbourhood, one satellite town. Nothing overlaps. Every branch is pulling weight.

The four ghosts

The four zero-revenue contractor codes trace the historical estate that Boots closed through 2023-2024:

• FRT58 (WV3 7HT, 1.32 mi) — Compton / Wightwick direction, 0.7 mi from operating FG043
• FD642 (WV11 1BQ, 2.37 mi) — Wednesfield, 0.6 mi from operating FH473
• FV523 (WV3 8HG, 2.49 mi) — Merry Hill / Penn, no adjacent survivor
• FLC50 (WV14 6PW, 2.53 mi) — Coseley / Bilston, no adjacent survivor

Two of the four ghosts (FRT58 and FD642) sit within ~0.7 miles of surviving branches — the classic "overlap closure" pattern. The other two (FV523 and FLC50) represent outright catchment exits where Boots is no longer the pharmacy serving that corner of the 3-mile ring.

What it means for the wider West Midlands

Birmingham B1 1BB at £55,435 operating average is the atlas's Boots underperformance story. Cycle 19's wider audit — Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall, Coventry — now shows the Birmingham weakness is city-core specific, not regional. The wider West Midlands Boots estate is NOT underperforming:

Wolverhampton's survivors beat every other West Midlands city by a clear margin. Dudley — the only other zero-ghost city in the atlas alongside Bristol — runs £108,906, itself well above Birmingham. The Birmingham city-core story is not a regional story; it is a B1-specific signature that this dedicated piece covers at indie-operator level.

Why the ghost rate still matters commercially

Even with strong survivors, a 57.1% ghost rate affects two downstream metrics job seekers and operators care about:

• Vacancy concentration. Boots's 547-posting national feed is weighted toward operating branches. A three-branch Wolverhampton footprint produces proportionally fewer postings than the raw "seven contractor codes" suggests. The local multiplier for Wolverhampton is closer to the Newcastle / Plymouth rate than to the Birmingham rate.
• Market entry signals. Independent operators reading the NHS Digital register see seven Boots codes in WV1 and assume the catchment is saturated. The ghost-corrected figure is three — a materially thinner competitive environment than the raw number suggests. Independent pharmacy growth in Wolverhampton is a cleaner opportunity than the raw branch count implies.

How this sits in the atlas

Wolverhampton joins the North of England + Merseyside + Plymouth cluster in the Boots "half-closed" tier (40-57% ghost). The five-city cluster accounts for 58 ghost contractor codes out of the thirteen-city total of 78, roughly 74% of all Boots ghosts. These are the regions that took the 2023 rationalisation hardest and are now stable at their reduced footprint.

Wolverhampton is distinctive within that cluster for two reasons: it is geographically in the Midlands (every other half-closed city is North-of-Watford or West Country), and its £137,266 operating average is the second-highest in the atlas behind Plymouth. Both facts point to the same structural story — Boots closed the overlaps and kept the strong standalones.

For the underlying data: PharmSee's pharmacy search covers Wolverhampton at branch level. The location analyser runs the same 3-mile ring against any WV postcode. For salary-adjacent angles on West Midlands pharmacy hiring, the salary page maps onto the three-speed market framing that the Wolverhampton signature fits.

Sources: NHSBSA Open Data, NHS Digital ODS pharmacy register, PharmSee cycle 19/20 /api/location/analyze pulls against WV1 1RT 3mi.