English Green Belt Atlas, v5

Where is the green belt? Where are the green belts? How much of my area is green belt land? These are excellent questions, but it's not always super easy to find the answer, and that's why I originally began investigating this topic back in 2012. This then eventually led to me producing maps for each English local authority that had green belt land in it, thanks to an idea suggested to me by geo legend Prof Bob Barr. Since I last did this in 2018 the number of local authorities in England has changed and there is a more recent green belt dataset, so I'm returning now with version 5 of my English Green Belt Atlas. Currently, 12.4% of land in England is designated as green belt, across 180 local authorities, but it varies a lot between places, as you can see below. I have made one map for each of the 180 areas, listed alphabetically (they are really high resolution images). How big is 12.4% of England? It's 16,140 square kilometres or 6,232 square miles. This is just a little bigger than the South East region or Yorkshire and the Humber, and about 80% the size of Wales, just to give a sense of scale. From 2020 to 2021 there was a 0.1% decrease in the amount of green belt land.

I did my best with the labelling

I've tried to keep the maps fairly simple

An example of a very split local authority area (rail line)

This area has the highest % green belt land in England

Not an awful lot of green belt land here

Okay, so you get the idea with the maps - I've shown rail lines (dark), railways stations (little circle dots), places (square dots, different sizes), major roads (orange), buildings (dark), water, green space (light blue) and green belt land in a darker green. The little dot in the bottom right inset map shows you where a local authority is, just in case any are not familiar. I've automated the labelling but it's not 100% perfect, but I can't spend any more time on it. Want to use one of these maps, or all of them? Be my guest.

Here's a few more that I found interesting. You can find the full set, listed alphabetically, right here.

Green Belt Atlas, version 4

This is a short post about an updated version of my Green Belt Atlas, in which I've produced a map of every local authority in England that contains land designated as green belt. The original idea for this came from GIS guru Bob Barr a couple of years ago and there have been a few versions so far but this one uses the latest data and includes some new features and improvements. Here's a sample map, for York. I'm going to do a follow-up post about some of the technical stuff.

As you can see, York is 82% green belt

I have put all 186 local authority maps in a public folder, so you can check that out if you're interested. I'll post a selection here as well. If you want to find out more about green belts and their history, I'd recommend reading John Grindrod's Outskirts.

See the whole lot here

This version of the Atlas is, I think, an improvement on previous ones I've produced. I'll cover more of the technical details and design choices in the next blog post but for now I'm just posting the maps, and a bit of summary data.

The reason I've done this is because I'm interested in land use, land cover and suchlike, and I know others are too. This version of the Atlas uses the latest data (2016-17 green belt boundaries), which you can find on data.gov.uk, along with data for previous years.

Here are a few green belt maps from the full set, just click an image to enlarge, or go to the full set if you want a  high resolution download. Green areas are land designated as green belt, and I've also shown buildings, roads, railways and I've added some place names. A summary datasheet for all 186 areas can be found here as well as at the bottom of the page.

But wait! Why map this at a local authority level? Well, clearly the green belts were not designated at the individual local authority level, and that's fine. But if we're looking at the kinds of things local planning authorities have responsibility for (e.g. housing) then they do need to be aware of this kind of thing, in my opinion. The Plain English guide to the planning system (paragraph 32) is a good reference point for this:

"This means that the requirement to meet housing needs must be balanced against other important considerations, such as protecting the Green Belt or addressing climate change and flooding."

So, my view is that it's entirely logical and sensible to look at this from a local perspective. 

Full green belt spreadsheet

A Land Cover Atlas of the UK

This blog post provides a bit more detail and background information about my new publication A Land Cover Atlas of the United Kingdom. It's basically a 23 page pdf accompanied by a set of 392 maps of land cover - one for each local authority in the UK, plus an overview map of the whole UK. The publication date kept getting pushed back because I was also working with the BBC on the topic and we wanted to ensure things went online at the same time. I have once again chosen Figshare to host this as it's an excellent platform for dissemination of this type of data. The Atlas uses Corine Land Cover 2012 data and was the result of a spare time summer project that I recently finished. See below for an example of one of the local authority maps, from Tonbridge and Malling in Kent, in the South East of England.

Tonbridge and Malling - a fairly fruity landscape

There are plenty of other land cover maps, and this is not new data, but I wanted to show what it looks like at the local level in a set of static maps and I hadn't seen it presented like that before; so it's kind of a new take on existing data. I did this partly because I wanted to be able to understand how areas differ but also because I wanted a better idea of the diversity of land cover at the local level across the UK in a way that was easy to digest. That's what I've attempted here. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if it works, but I quite like the results as it give me a better understanding of land cover nationwide.

The rest of this post just provides a little bit more background detail to the Atlas project itself and some of the decisions I made in producing it, including a few pictures.

First of all, I wanted this to cover the whole UK. I thought it would be interesting to be able compare all 391 local authorities in terms of their land cover. It's always a bit annoying when you see some great data but your part of the country isn't included! The Corine classification has a total of 44 land use classes but since it covers the whole of Europe there are some categories that don't appear in the UK - such as Glaciers. This leaves a total of 39, though some of these 'land cover' categories are actually water. 

Anyway, each map legend lists all possible land cover categories so that you can easily compare places and the proportion of different land types in them. I thought it was also important to be able to identify what land cover types areas don't have, that's why you'll see a legend entry for a category even if it doesn't appear on the map.

I also wanted the project to be based on open data and open source software, so I used Corine (open), Ordnance Survey data (open), Source Sans Pro font (open) and QGIS (free, open source). See the images below for a bit more on this kind of thing.

Not that it really matters, but I do like an open font

This map extract is from the Angus council area in Scotland

This was a spare time project that got out of hand

The full resolution maps are quite big - see permanent link 

I also wanted to show what land cover areas do not contain

Values <1% are shown in light font

Scale is always shown, but areas differ hugely in size

Some slight boundary line mismatches - later maps will have a fix

This all started with me wanting to investigate what percent of the UK is 'urban' and how much is 'golf course' using the new OS greenspace data. I got to the bottom of the latter but in relation to the former it really does depend upon how you measure it. I don't believe there is a definitive answer but if I was pressed, I'd always say less than 10%. Corine data suggests it is about 6%. 

Take a look at the Atlas document itself if you're interested - and then check out the map for your area. You can also see more about this in a related BBC story, for which I produced a set of simplified Corine maps that are much easier to digest because they only show four categories.

In the BBC piece, I also decided to show building footprints, as a way to add a little more detail and legibility to the maps. This meant I had to create a set of files with all UK buildings in it. For Great Britain this was pretty time consuming, but straightforward. For Northern Ireland I had to create it using open data. But the end result was quite satisfying and after a bit of to-and-fro with Tom Armitage from Digimap to confirm my figures I was ready to go. As it happens, the total area of the UK covered by buildings amounts to about 1.3%. In Great Britain overall it's about 1.4%, which is much higher than, say, the land covered by golf courses: 0.54%. I have also calculated these figures at local authority level, but that's one for another day.

Mind you, if you are stuck for something to say during a lull in conversation, you might want to interject with "I say, did you know that Islington is 30% building, and that Birmingham and Manchester are both 15% building?".

Notes: I have done my best to map this as accurately and clearly as possible. If you do spot any mistakes, please feel free to get in touch. Like I said above, there are other methods for mapping land cover and there are other data sources so don't take this as the definitive account. Having said this, I think it provides a good overview of land cover in the UK at a local level. There are some further notes on these kinds of things in my Atlas document, on page 3. The Appendices also contain data tables on land cover for each part of the UK.