Land Utilisation Survey of Britain

The Land Utilisation Survey of Britain (also Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain) was a comprehensive survey of land use in Great Britain in the 1930s. The survey was the first such comprehensive survey in Britain since the Domesday Book survey in the 11th Century. A Second Land Use Survey was carried out in the 1960s. Subsequent work has mainly been based on satellite imagery, with sample field survey work for quality checking.

The first survey was instigated in the 1930s by L.Dudley Stamp, reader and later professor of geography at the London School of Economics.

Mapping was carried out by volunteers at the scale of six inches to the mile (1:10,560) using around 20,000 six-inch field maps. The maps were published at one inch to the mile (1:63,360) using the Ordnance Survey One Inch 'Popular Edition' (the 4th Edition) as the base. Publication of maps and reports began in 1933 and was completed in 1948 after interruption by World War II, though sheets were published in every year from 1933 to 1948 with the exception of 1941 (Stamp 1948). The printing plates of the pre-war maps were destroyed by bombing. Besides maps and regional summaries, publications leading from the survey included Stamp's 1937 and 1948 books The Land of Britain.

By comparison with later surveys the classification employed relatively few categories. The base-map was overprinted with a wash of six basic colours to indicate broad land-use categories: Yellow (moorland and heath), light green (grassland), dark green (woodland), brown (arable), purple ('gardens etc.') and red (agriculturally unproductive). The key subdivided each of these by reference to the detail already present in the base-map, for example woodland into coniferous, deciduous, mixed and new plantations.

Built-up areas showed essentially only two categories of urban (red) and suburban (purple) land. The suburban and urban categories in combination with the base-map detail allowed the key to subdivide suburbs into 'houses with gardens sufficiently large to be productive of fruit, vegetables, flowers, etc.' and 'new housing areas, nurseries and allotments'. Urban areas were subdivided into 'land so closely covered with houses and other buildings as to be agriculturally unproductive' and 'yards, cemeteries, pits. quarries, tip heaps, new industrial works, etc.'.

All the one inch to one mile maps created by the Survey are available on-line for study at the Vision of Britain website created by the Great Britain Historical GIS, including the unpublished maps of upland Scotland which Stamp deposited with the Royal Geographical Society, plus the ten mile to one inch summary sheets. These maps are still the copyright of Stamp's estate, for 70 years after his death in 1966.

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