Thursday 2 June 2011

UK land use at a glance

The BBC did a handy chart on different types of land use in the four nations of the UK. Remember, England is just over half of the UK by surface area and sixty-two million of us are living, working and commuting back and forth on those little grey bits:

8 comments:

James Higham said...

More mountain and moorland in NI than Wales.

marksany said...

I'd like to see it with the column widths proportional to the land area of each country

ontheotherhand said...

'Urban' of course includes roads, rail, commercial buildings, gardens and domestic buildings. According to DCLG Generalised Land Use Survey, 1% of England is actual domestic buildings, about the same as freshwater which you can see on the chart. Gardens add another 4%.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, more mountains in W and more moorlands in NI, I guess.

MA, in that case just squint at the bars for E and NI to get the overall picture (NI being a fair average of NI, W and S).

OTOH, yup, that GLUD is most useful and I've referred to it often enough. Alternatively you can just look out of an aeroplane window or look at a satellite picture and you get the same impression.

Bayard said...

Those charts don't take into account "Rurban fringe": those parts of the country that are nominally farmland, but are actually part of suburbia, e.g. nearly all of Surrey. Much of this land isn't doing anything more useful than providing grazing for horses, which we British famously don't eat.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, a visitor from outer space would assume that the UK is a grass based economy.

But fair play, seeing as the rental value of farmland is no more than £100/acre/year, if somebody wants to spend that much on Jocasta's pony, why shouldn't he? It's not doing any harm, is it?

Bayard said...

"But fair play, seeing as the rental value of farmland is no more than £100/acre/year"

But this isn't farmland, it's "accommodation land", worth five times as much and with rents, presumably, to match.

BTW yer true NIMBY doesn't really like farmers, because they drive noisy tractors and have cows that moo, make smells and leave shit on the roads.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, if farmers can charge City gents £500 a year for an acre of land, then both parties are happy (and if we had LVT, it'd be even better than that). Agreed as to smelliness of farming, hence why I am a surburban fox.