How to Find Closed Businesses Near You on Companies House

Most people know Companies House as the place you register a company or check who owns what. Fewer people know it's also one of the best free tools available for researching a location before you open a business there.

Every company registered in the UK — including the ones that have since dissolved — stays on the register. That means years of local business history is sitting there, searchable, for free. Here's how to actually use it.

What You're Looking For

When you're evaluating a site, the question you want Companies House to answer is: what types of businesses have tried to operate near here, and how many of them closed?

You're not after a single address — you want a picture of the surrounding area. And you want to be able to filter by how recently things closed, so you're looking at relevant, recent history rather than companies that folded before the area was anything like it is today.

Companies House lets you do both.

Step 1: Go to the Advanced Company Search

The standard search on find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk is fine for looking up a specific company by name. For location-based research, you want the advanced search.

From the homepage, click "Advanced company search" underneath the main search bar.

This opens a form with a set of filters that most people never touch.

Step 2: Search by Location

In the advanced search, you'll see a field labelled "Registered office address". This is where the location filtering happens, and it works as a fuzzy text match — meaning you don't need an exact address. You can enter:

• A postcode (e.g. E8 1 or M1)
• A street name (e.g. Brick Lane)
• A town or area (e.g. Hackney or Didsbury)

The search will return companies whose registered address contains that string. It's not a radius search — it's matching text in the address field — so it works best with a postcode prefix or a specific street name that's distinct enough to narrow things down.

Practical tip: Use the first half of a postcode (the "outward code" — e.g. SE15, LS6, BN1) to capture a reasonably tight local area without being so specific you miss nearby streets with different postcodes.

Step 3: Filter by Company Status — Dissolved

By default, the search returns all company statuses. You want to narrow this to closed companies only.

Find the "Company status" filter and select "Dissolved". You can also select "Liquidation" if you want to capture companies still in the wind-down process, but dissolved is the most useful for historical research.

This alone will often produce a large list. That's fine — you're going to narrow it further.

Step 4: Set a "Dissolved From" Date

This is the filter that makes the research genuinely useful.

Look for the "Dissolved from" and "Dissolved to" date fields. Set the "from" date to five years ago (or however far back is relevant to you — five years is a good default for understanding recent local trading conditions).

Leave the "to" date blank, or set it to today, to capture everything in that window.

Now you're looking at companies that registered a local address and dissolved within your chosen timeframe. That's the pool of businesses that tried something nearby and stopped.

Step 5: Filter by SIC Code (Optional but Useful)

SIC codes are the business category classifications Companies House assigns. If you want to look specifically at businesses similar to yours — rather than all closures — you can filter by SIC code.

The field is labelled "SIC codes" in the advanced search. You can enter multiple codes.

Some useful ones:

You can find the full list here https://resources.companieshouse.gov.uk/sic/

Filtering by SIC code lets you ask a very specific question: how many cafés (or barbers, or delis) have dissolved in this postcode area in the last five years?

Reading the Results

Once you've run the search, you'll get a list of company names, their registered addresses, and their dissolution dates. A few things to look at:

How long did they trade? Click through to an individual company and you'll see the incorporation date alongside the dissolution date. A business that incorporated in 2019 and dissolved in 2020 is a different signal from one that ran from 2017 to 2023. Short runs suggest the business struggled from early on. Longer runs followed by dissolution might indicate an external factor — rising rents, a change in the area, the owner moving on.

What was the registered address? Companies often register at their trading address, but sometimes use an accountant's office or a home address. If the address matches the site or street you're researching, it's a direct data point. If it's a generic registered office address, the connection to the physical site is looser.

Are there clusters? If multiple dissolved companies share the same street or postcode, that's worth noting. Especially if they're in the same category. One closure is a data point; three closures in the same format on the same stretch is a pattern.

What Companies House Won't Tell You

It's worth being honest about the limits here.

Not every business is incorporated as a limited company. Sole traders and partnerships don't appear on Companies House at all — so you may be missing a significant portion of the local business history, particularly in lower-capital categories like market stalls, small independent retailers, or sole-trader tradespeople.

Dissolution also doesn't always mean failure. Some businesses close because the owner retires, sells up, or moves the business to a new entity. The record doesn't distinguish between these. You'll need a bit of detective work — a search for the company name, a look at whether a successor business appeared nearby — to get a fuller picture.

And the registered address is not always the trading address. A company may have operated from a unit in your target street while registering at an accountant's office across town. So you may miss some relevant closures and inadvertently pick up some irrelevant ones.

Use the data as a starting point, not a verdict.

Making It Part of Your Research

For anyone seriously evaluating a business location, spending time investigating each dissolution on Companies House can take time. But it can help you answer some useful questions that could help your business succeed: which categories have been tried, how long things lasted, and whether there are patterns that point at something structural about the area.

That context doesn't make the decision for you. But it stops you going in blind — and it gives you better questions to ask when you do visit the site.