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 and I don't want to spread misinformation. 

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

Update 26 October 2023: I think the figure is 1.2 million, as I explain in this post


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.