Southall, Humphrey

English

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

R U R A L  H I S T O R Y  T O D A YIssue  | January 
Since 2003, the Great Britain Historical GIS team 
based at Portsmouth University have done a series of 
projects analysing historical land use data funded by 
government agencies:
The Agricultural Change and Environment 
Observatory was established within the Department 
of the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs to 
monitor changes in agriculture, particularly those 
arising from the 2003 Common Agricultural Policy 
reforms. One issue is how changes in the structure of 
farm businesses affects farming practices, and so  
the landscape.
One of the Environment Agency’s primary 
responsibilities is for implementing the European 
Union’s Water Quality Directive. One aspect of this is 
reducing the amounts of nitrates, ‘nitrate vulnerable 
zones’ currently covering 20 of England. Given 
that reducing fertiliser use may make arable farming 
non-viable, identifying which areas were traditionally 
pastoral and converted to arable during or after  
World War II is one way of targeting action.
Natural England exists “to conserve and enhance 
the natural environment, for its intrinsic value, 
the wellbeing and enjoyment of people and the 
economic prosperity that it brings.” This includes the 
Environmental Stewardship scheme, funded by the 
European Union as part of the Common Agricultural 
Policy, Pillar 2. UK funding under this for 2007–13 is 
£4.5bn. According to Andrew Baker of NE, “Place based 
evidence of long term change will greatly aid in our 
interpretation of the evidence arising from landscape 
monitoring programmes such as Countryside Quality 
Counts”. One way this can happen is through better 
understanding of the landscapes associated with “low 
input farming”, which we are maybe moving back 
towards.
The GBH GIS team became involved with historical 
land use surveys because of our unusual expertise in 
large scale digitisation projects based on historical geo-
spatial data. Our most detailed work has focused on 
the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain, based at 
the London School of Economics and led by Professor 
L. Dudley Stamp. Most of the country was surveyed 
between 1931 and 1934, but lack of funds meant it took 
until 1949 to publish the resulting one inch to one mile 
maps; 56 sheets covering upland Scotland were never 
published, but carefully hand-coloured and deposited 
with the Royal Geographical Society (figure 1). In 
2004, DEFRA and EA funding allowed us to scan all 
the published maps, and in 2005 funding from the 
Frederick Soddy Trust plus assistance from the RGS and 
Imperial Mapping Ltd added the unpublished Scottish 
sheets. These scans have been assembled into a single 
seamless electronic map which forms part of our open 
access web site, A Vision of Britain through Time, so the 
whole of the LUSGB has finally been published and can 
be viewed at www.visionofbritain.org.uk
The Second Land Utilisation Survey was directed by 
Professor Alice Coleman of King’s College London and 
collected more detailed information than the LUSGB. 
The survey was completed relatively quickly between 
1960 and 1963, but publishing the results was again 
more problematic. Only 15 of the mapping was ever 
published, but the whole survey is still held privately by 
Professor Coleman. 
The Land Use UK survey was carried out in 1996–7, 
and largely limited itself to a stratified sample of 1,000 
1km grid squares. It did however create a conventional 
map of the Brighton area. This is of immense interest as 
it uses the same methods as the earlier surveys for a date 
when satellite data are available. Our separate Land of 
Britain demonstration web site (www.landofbritain.
org.uk) presents data from all the sources discussed 
here for the Brighton area.
Building on this work, DEFRA has funded 
research into the records of the agricultural census 
or ‘June Survey’, taken annually since 1866. The only 
published data are by county, and we have assembled 
all available transcriptions so that Vision of Britain 
includes data for at least every tenth year for English 
counties, and at least for 1871, 1901, 1931 and 1961 for 
Scotland and Wales. Parish-level statistics exist in 
Putting the past into practice: 
Applying historical land use information
Humphrey Southall, 
Director, GB Historical 
GIS/University of 
Portsmouth describes the 
work of the Great Britain 
Historical GIS team.
Figure  – Hand-coloured Land Utilisation Survey of Great 
Britain map of the Inverness area
R U R A L  H I S T O R Y  T O D A Y Issue  | January 
manuscript form in the National Archives. We have 
located several transcriptions, usually limited to single 
counties or smaller groups of parishes, but analytic 
work has concentrated on transcriptions by Coppock 
covering south-east England in 1877 and 1931(figure 
2 & 3). We would be pleased to hear about additional 
transcriptions of county- or parish-level data.
Natural England funded an investigation of the 1941 
National Farm Survey. This is of interest partly because 
this is the only year for which the original farm-level 
returns from the June Survey have been preserved. 
Maps in MAF.73 show the boundaries of every farm 
in England and Wales. However, in 1941 “surveyors” 
qualitatively assessed each farmer and farm: “bad” 
farmers occupying “good” land would be replaced 
by managers for the duration of the war. Records of 
the survey comprise about 1.1m. questionnaires and 
36,000 maps. It would be possible albeit very expensive 
to create a conventional GIS from these data, but 
we concluded that they could be scanned and made 
accessible on-line for under £200,000. 
Funding from government agencies has thus enabled 
extensive surveys of available data, and a series of 
feasibility studies for large scale computerisation. The 
latter has focused on automated methods for converting 
the existing scanned images of the LUSGB maps into 
sets of land use polygons represented by vectors, from 
which the creation of land use statistics by parish or 
district would be a small further step. We have shown 
that this is possible, at much lower cost than manually 
digitising the maps, but the necessary funding has so 
far been available from neither the agencies nor the 
research councils.
Our current work is funded by the Frederick Soddy 
Trust and is aimed at developing broad conclusions 
on trends in land use since the 1930s, comparing maps 
from the land utilisation surveys with modern Land 
Cover mapping. This work focuses on changes at the 
edges of towns and on conversion of moorland to 
improved grazing. Rather than trying to vectorise the 
published LUSGB maps, we are focusing on those areas 
covered by the original colour separations now held by 
the LSE archives: six separations were created by the 
LUSGB for each published sheet, each containing just 
one colour layer, so they are far easier to vectorise than 
the published maps (figure 4).
To learn more about how typical rural areas have 
changed, away from towns and moorland, we are 
seeking funding for a research student who would draw 
on all the sources listed here, plus various kinds of 
historical photography, to study the earlier landscape 
history of the seven lowland English parishes covered by 
Natural England’s New Agricultural Landscapes studies, 
begun in 1972 and repeated in 1983, 1994 and 2005.
The changing land of Britain has been recorded 
in remarkable detail over the last century, such that 
the sheer volume of material is the largest barrier to 
systematic analysis.
Figure  – Cows in 
milk relative to wheat 
acreages in , from 
Coppock’s sample of 
parish-level agricultural 
census data
Figure  – Cabbage 
Acreages in  
(proportional circles) 
relative to  population 
density (colours), from 
Coppock’s sample of 
parish-level agricultural 
census data
Figure  (below) –  
Comparing the green 
layer colour separation 
for part of the Salisbury 
and Bulford area with 
an adjacent area of the 
published LUSGB map. 
The solid areas on the 
separation are woodland 
and the striped areas  
are pasture.


Putting the past into practice: applying historical land use information

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