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.

Toddlers, teens and yoofs - where are they?

I've been doing some work on child poverty and social mobility recently, and part of this has involved looking at simple stats like the percentage of people in each area who are under 18. This has given me a better insight into which areas might be most affected by children's issues and policies. I've been looking across Great Britain but focusing on England and Wales and so I thought I'd just post a couple of maps showing the % of children across London Boroughs and the core cities - see below.

Bigger version for London

The results are quite striking - and particularly interesting I think are the differences between and within the core cities. What is also very interesting is the spatial divides in terms of which areas have a high concentration of children and which don't. These data overlap with many other datasets - which is partly what I'm looking at in my research right now - but this post is simply about the two maps.

Bigger version for core cities

One academic-related thought on this, though. I've been looking at the literature on neighbourhood effects over the past few years and following with interest the debate on where people 'choose' to live. This got me thinking about who might not get to choose, and children is one obvious group. As you can see from the maps there are large areas where 25% or more of the residents are children, and some areas where it is nearly 50%. Also interesting for me is the extent to which city centres in (e.g.) Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds are largely child-free - possibly linked to the concentration of students and new city centre living. Anyway, that's enough for now.

Technical note: this is done at the lower super output area level and for the local authority boundaries of the English core cities, plus all of Greater London. The data are from 2011 Census table KS102EW.