Building an understanding of what temporary use is, the role that it plays, and the function it fulfils has been the subject of an expanding literature since the mid-2000s. Such academic and media coverage has consistently surmised temporary as an urban agenda oriented toward leisure, trade, tourism and urban greening within large metropolises, capital cities and macro economies (conurbations like: Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Vienna and New York). Consequently, and in spite of their overtly atypical contexts, isolated and often repetitive cases of temporary occurring within different contexts at contrasting intervals of time, have fast become misinterpreted as general representation of the ‘temporary condition’. Nonetheless, they consistently fail to depict the reality of the ‘temporary condition’ or to consider the ordinary within this context. Temporary urbanism has become an element of urban theory transfixed with the apparent success and dynamism of explicit, stylish practices within creative (mostly global) cities. Whilst previous studies have been valuable in offering insight into the nature of this peculiar urban context, there is now a need to construct an alternative inflection in urban-regional theory that seeks to reflect the experiences of cities beyond the global city network. Similar to the lack of consideration of ordinary realities, systematic studies of the spatio-temporal dimensions of temporary use within specific geographical contexts are limited. Reviews addressing how temporary uses have been mobilised over time within specific conurbations or sets of conurbations remain a rarity. It is the aim of this paper to destabilise the existing treatment of the ‘temporary’ as some kind of iconic, stylish, and overtly radical condition. Instead, a broader approach to cities, an approach more inclusive of the diversity of experience in ordinary cities, will be presented. Alongside this and in order to better understand the role and function of temporary use, changes over time within these ordinary conurbations will be examined. The research deployed a systematic quantitative methodology to collect and collate 5883 applications for temporary use within the eight Core Cities’ of England over a fifteen year period (2000-2015). These 5883 cases were coded to assess a number of core variables within the temporary use debate looking in depth at temporary urbanism within: Birmingham; Bristol; Leeds; Liverpool; Manchester; Newcastle; Nottingham and Sheffield. Employing multinomial logistic regression, various models were developed to identify statistically significant relationships within a range of structural variables that include: type of temporary use; time of occurrence; the function of space appropriated; decisions taken and; whether instances were isolated or happened to re-occur over the fifteen year time period. Through this analysis of Big Data, this paper discusses findings which debunk a considerable number of assumptions about temporary use, ultimately positing some alternative questions as to the true role and function of temporary use within cities.