Creating an English green belt atlas

UPDATE: I've fixed the glitches in version 1 and compiled a spreadsheet with the data. See new download at the bottom of the post.

I've blogged before about green belt, and also written about the underlying data in the press. Now that the data are open, I've finally got round to finishing a little project I meant to complete ages ago. I was prompted to do this during a recent visit to my department by Prof Bob Barr, a legend in the data and GIS worlds. Bob said it would be good to know what percentage of the land area in each local authority in England was covered by green belt. I agree, so here are the results of my analysis (using 2014 green belt data) from Version 1 of my English green belt 'atlas' (actually lots of individual images to keep the file size down). Here's a snapshot of one of the maps...

Green belt land in Cheshire East

And another, this time from Birmingham. You can see that I've dimmed the background so that you can get a sense of other green belt land in the areas I've mapped.

Birmingham green belt land

Finally, a few more from around the country...

There are some glitches in the data but my initial overview suggests the numbers are pretty accurate (see exceptions below). I hope that people might find these maps useful. If you want to use any of them, be my guest.

Download all the files here (154MB): Green Belt Atlas 2014 (version 2) (186 individual map files, plus spreadsheet)

Download just the spreadsheet: percent green belt figures for each of the 186 local authorities:

Contents of the spreadsheet (download above)

Warnings: A couple of issues with version 1... 1. The West Lancashire greenbelt area extends into the sea on the green belt shapefile available from DCLG, so the figures here are incorrect (working on a fix). 2. The figure for Ashfield is clearly wrong - not sure why, so I will fix that too. 3. Some areas have extremely low values and may not actually be in the green belt - it may instead be down to the accuracy of underlying data. 4. Mole Valley currently missing, am looking into why. UPDATE: I looked again at the original Green Belt shapefile from DCLG and found that Mole Valley had the same code as Ashfield, so I fixed that and there's now a map for Mole Valley. New Forest was also assigned two different codes, so I've fixed that too. Also, in the percent figure, I've exluded the part of the West Lancashire green belt that is not on land, so this gives an accurate figure now. You can see from the image below that part of the green belt goes into the Ribble Estuary.

Technical stuff: I did this in QGIS 2.8 (open source GIS software) using the Atlas tool and a very heavy laptop, plus a bit of trickery I picked up here and there. I blogged about this before, with a little tutorial. Perhaps I should actually be using the term 'green belts', as Richard Blyth pointed out, but forgive me for this.

Static maps from CartoDB

I've used CartoDB quite a bit recently to create interactive maps. My Historic Buildings of Scotland map and my England Grade I Listed Buildings map have both proved popular. Another map that received lots of traffic was my English Greenbelt map. This one in particular was popular I think because it allowed people to find out exactly where the green belt was near them - or in fact to find out which areas aren't greenbelt. Although interactive maps are great for some things, sometimes we just want to put a static image in a report or on a website and this can often be a bit tricky with interactive content. Luckily, CartoDB allows users to export static image files (png format), and you can customise the dimensions as well. This CartoDB blog post shows you how - though you may need to disable pop-ups in your browser if it doesn't work. This tool opens up the static map in a new browser tab so if nothing happens check your pop-up blocker settings.

View the full size version

As you can see above, I've exported my English Greenbelt map. I often get asked if I have a large static image of it because if you search online there aren't really any large up to date, decent resolution, detailed green belt images. I also added some attribution information (important!) and a basic title. This is just a quick example so isn't perfect in relation to labels and so on but it gives a simple overview of the green belt.

About the Green Belt

Last week I did a short piece for the Guardian about the lack of an open map of England's green belt. This morning CPRE published a map and short briefing about the green belt being under threat (extract below). There is a national PDF map and a more detailed briefing about particular examples but there is still no way to zoom in to local areas to see it in more detail. 

The map also cites the source of the data - not the government - so that's why it can't be open and shared. I think this is a bad situation but I've said that already. I just can't believe that such an important national dataset is not in the public domain. Rant over. Nice work from CPRE though. 

Is there a link between closed green belt data and attempts to open up the green belt for development? Probably not, but there might be a relationship between the two.

England's Green Belt - 'Closed' Data

At the moment I'm doing some work related to housing market search behaviour and I have a very interesting dataset for it. I thought it would be nice to compare housing market search patterns to where areas of green belt land in England are. This is where I ran into problems. Everyone knows that there is green belt land in England, but knowing precisely where it is and how to get this in digital format is more difficult.

It seems that, for whatever reason, Landmark Information Group have the rights to the data, as you can also see from this BBC map. The problem is, I was quoted a price of £35,000 + VAT for the full dataset. I've nothing against Landmark but I couldn't figure out why it would be so costly or why it is not open data. To cut a long story short, I got the data directly from the Department for Communities and Local Government but the licence means I can't really do much with it publicly, so I've made a small map below showing what it looks like.

The problem with this is that if a normal person* just wants to check which areas of the country are green belt and which aren't (and given current proposals to reform the planning system in England, this is quite important!), it cannot be done easily, if at all. What I'd really like to do is take the green belt shape file and put it on top of a Google map and then let the world see it. But it's not my data, it's not open data, so I can't. This seems like a pity and not just because I'm addicted to mapping things. It seems like a pity because this information should, I feel, be in the public domain in an accessible format. 

*Clearly, I'm not a normal person or I would be doing something else at this time of day/week.