WELCOME TO THE LAND OF BRITAIN

Seventy years ago, Dudley Stamp's Land Utilisation Survey organised Britain's schoolchildren to map the whole country. He reported their findings in The Land of Britain: Its Use and Misuse. We have carried on using and mis-using our land, causing many changes. These changes have been recorded by two more land use surveys like Stamps', by government surveys of farmers, and recently by satellites -- but nowhere have these sources been assembled to let you see how your local area has changed.

This web site is just a demonstration of what could be done, limited to a small area around Britain, but almost all the sources used here exist for the whole country:

• Stamp's published 1930s map at one inch to one mile, and two examples of the original field survey sheets.
• The 1:25,000 scale map published by the 1960s 2nd Land Utilisation Survey, directed by Professor Alice Coleman.
• A matching map published in 1996 by the Land Use UK Survey, directed by Professor Rex Walford.
• Parish-level information from the Farm Census is available for every year since 1869 -- we map statistics for 1877 and 1931.
• We present farm-level data from the remarkable National Farm Survey of 1942.
• The site includes freely available satellite mapping from Corine and Landsat -- more detailed data is available for a price.

Our map viewer does not just let you view these individual sources for the Brighton area, you can overlay two or more sources and vary transparency so you can see two or more maps at the same time. Unfortunately, this only works on a modern standards-based browser such as Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 8.