What Percent Golf Course is Your Area?

There has been a fairly long-running debate in the UK media about the extent to which golf courses cover the landscape. I've been working on a related topic recently, so when Ordnance Survey last week released an open dataset containing golf course coverage I thought I'd have a go at answering the question myself. The answer I arrived at was that Great Britain is about 0.54% golf course - or about 1,256 square kilometres (about the same area as the whole of Greater Manchester). 

The local authority with the largest area of golf courses is Woking in Surrey, at 10.74%. I originally calculated it at just over 7% but I had to make some edits due to the number of courses that straddle the local authority boundary and weren't being included. I've done the calculation a couple of times and also manually so I'm sure it's pretty accurate.

Woking - 10% golf course

Edinburgh - about 4.2% golf course

Why am I doing this? Do I hate golf and golfers? No, not at all. I used to play golf (a fine game) and have some golf clubs in my shed so I couldn't say I'm part of any anti-golf lobby. The reason is that I like to know things like this, particularly when such figures are used to debate issues like housing and the availability of land in some parts of the country. The fact that Woking appears to be 10% golf course is not a criticism, it just appears to be a fact. But I do find these numbers interesting. Here's the top 20 by local authority - and remember that Ordnance Survey just covers Great Britain not the whole UK so there are no Northern Ireland figures here. I'm not aware of a similar dataset that would allow me to do these calculations for Northern Ireland.

Is this a lot? Well, that depends

I've also done some summary statistics for Great Britain and the different countries within it. From this, we can see that Great Britain is about 0.54% golf course, England 0.74%, Scotland 0.28% and Wales 0.34%. From my analysis of the data, this does seem to include golf driving ranges as well. I'm not sure about crazy golf - don't think that's included but it would probably be a tiny fraction of land. The same goes for 'pitch and putt' type areas

Golf courses take up about the same area as Greater Manchester

If you want to explore the data yourself, I've made it available in a Google sheet - and also added in area codes and region names. According to my calculations, only 10 local authority areas in Great Britain have no golf courses within them, as follows:

• Tamworth
• Adur
• City of London
• Camden
• Hammersmith and Fulham
• Islington
• Kensington and Chelsea
• Lambeth
• Tower Hamlets
• Westminster

Finally, at the suggestion of David O'Sullivan, I had a little look to see if there was a correlation between the percent of each area covered by golf courses and the percent voting for Brexit. There really isn't.

Not much of a relationship at all

Data credit: Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2017

Data note: to deal with the issue of golf courses that straddle local authority boundaries, I cut them in two using a local authority boundary file. My original calculations didn't do this and it turns out it makes a bit of a difference in some areas, including Woking, where the courses on boundaries end up not being counted. I'm pretty confident these figures are accurate - based on the underlying data - but of course other people have calculated similar numbers in the past and arrived at different results. Some of these were based on estimates but my calculations are based on the new Ordnance Survey dataset so I'm confident they are at least close to the correct figure.

London+ (or, another way of looking at London)

Just over six years ago, there was a bit of a fuss when a marketing campaign attempted to re-brand parts of Northamptonshire as 'North Londonshire' owing to the relative accessibility of places like Corby and Kettering for Central London commuting. This stands in contrast to the accessibility of some other places in the South East, such as Hastings. A few years after that I was working up something on the topic in the Guardian news room but it never went anywhere and I completely forgot about it until last week and the London Mayoral Elections, when I began to think again about the relative importance of London to everywhere around it. First of all, here's a map of the area I identified as 'London+', followed by a bit more explanation of what it's about. The whole area (including Greater London itself) contains 18.9 million people - more than a third of the population of England.

The whole area includes 118 local authorities and 18.9 million people

My idea was not to try to say any of the London+ areas are in or part of London but rather that they play an important role in the vast, complex London labour and housing markets - some areas more so than others, obviously. I wanted to identify areas that, owing to their physical and temporal proximity could be considered part of a much wider commuting and housing zone. This is far from new, but I wanted to base my analysis on a few principles, which I've set out in the slides embedded below. For this, I also used a quite generous 90 minute commute time to Central London, which can be approximated quite nicely on Mapumental, as you can see below as well.

Peterborough was included here but not in my final definition

I'm thinking of the whole London+ area as Greater London plus the surrounding local authorities that are most accessible in terms of getting into Central London. That's the main reason there is a big chunk of East Sussex missing. It takes about 50 minutes on the train from Brighton to London but about twice that from Hastings, even though Hastings is only about 15 miles further away. You'll see some other maps in the slides above, including some of the ones I've shown below.

Population density for 1km cells 

Areas of green belt are also important here

Commuting flows in the London+ area

Same as before, but with labels (click to enlarge)

What's the point of all this, then? It's not to annoy everyone outside Greater London by referring to them under the heading 'London+'. Instead, I'm trying to get a sense of the true nature of the inter-connectedness of London and its wider commuting hinterland: areas which depend upon each other in many ways but which have a variety of different governance, planning and infrastructure approaches and priorities. Perhaps it's time to talk about regional planning again.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this stuff now as it's been sitting on my hard drive for three years (apart from the last two commuting images, which I just added in for interest). 

Want to know which areas are in and which are out? Take a look at the spreadsheet and also the final map below.  

Full screen version

Post-script: try searching 'North Londonshire' on Rightmove - it still works. Is this big 'London+' area supposed to be a 'greater-Greater London'? Not quite. I think of it partly as London's sphere of influence in terms of potential commuting, partly as one big interconnected labour market area - with London the core but lots going on beyond and around it. Also, there are similarities here between my notion of London+ and previous conceptions of a London mega-region (e.g. Hall and Pain's work, below - with mapping by Nick Green).

The Hall and Pain area has an almost identical population