Wednesday, 13 June 2018

How many people live in the English green belt?

There was a blog post here about the total population living on land in England that is designated as green belt.

I decided to take it down because I wasn't as confident as I wanted to be about my original estimate of 3.5 million and I don't want to spread misinformation. This figure could be correct, but it may not be.

The problem is that it's impossible to know for sure with the data we have available, which is a shame. Perhaps in future we'll move to a position where we can easily answer these questions with better open data.

For now, I am just leaving this here as a note to anyone who might have seen the original post or tweet (also deleted).

Normal service shall resume soon.

15 June 2018


Note
You can find some English green belt shapefiles on this page, though they seem to mostly be historic ones (e.g. 2007-08) unless you click 'Show more' in which case you'll get everything from 2007-08 to 2016-17.