"Look at it this way"

Natural England has updated the National Landscape Character assessments on their website.  Wherever you are in England you are in one of these areas, which has a particular character. Each NCA represents an area of distinct and recognisable character at the national scale.  Their boundaries follow natural lines in the landscape, not county or district boundaries.  This makes them a good framework for decision-making and planning for future change.  The information contained within the NCA profiles aims to help guide land management and other activities to strengthen character and resilience, responding to pressures such as climate change. I was born in Area 38: Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire Coalfield I studied in Area 37: Yorkshire Southern Pennine Fringe I trained as a teacher in Area 41: Humber Estuary My first job was in Area 69: Trent Valley Washlands The first home I owned was in Area 76: North West Norfolk and my school was on the very edge o...

The new Living England 2022-23 habitat map is now live! Download freely from https://t.co/rR1gT2IaPl (coming soon on Magic). It’s more reliable & user-friendly than ever - providing essential habitat data for natural capital monitoring across England. pic.twitter.com/5PmDIHjeli — NE Chief Scientist (@NEChiefSci) November 12, 2024 Visit the link, and see the details in the technical report.  

Why is York rubbish at karate ?  It only has a green belt... It's the way I tell 'em... A very useful article in the Daily Telegraph just before Christmas provided a range of ideas related to the GREEN BELT. There was a very useful INTERACTIVE MAP Even more useful was a data set for download to GIS files.... Follow the link from the bottom of the article to download a zip file. These ideas and many others are currently being developed into materials for the OS MapStream service, and will be coming soon to a computer near you...

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the London Olympics has been in the news today, as there was a practice run last night. It turns out that three people I know attended the event, but they've promised to #savethesecret although I did a search on #ruinthesecret and found a few pictures. It's no surprise that the ceremony is based around a pastoral view of England. The Evening Telegraph used the headline 'Farm Olympics' when the first pictures were released. Now Henry Porter, writing in the Observer  says that the event made him fall in love with our landscape all over again. This may be a resource that is worth deconstructing once it's over, in terms of its description of our landscape... It's certainly an interesting Cultural Geographical event...

Regular readers of the blog may remember some recent posts on the idea of LANDSCAPE CHARACTER. Came across an old map when sorting through some stuff in the loft at the weekend which showed the whole of the UK split into different areas. On it was a website, which turned out to be out of date, but did lead me to the Countryside Quality Counts website. Some useful resources here for exploring local landscape change...

Got a copy of this document on Monday night via the Norfolk Coast Partnership It's the proposed plan for 2009-2014. It includes some useful sections on landscape , and something called landscape character . The whole of the Norfolk coast has been split into sections which have a particular character. I live on the border of the North Norfolk AONB: Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which then extends all along the coast from my village. What is Landscape character ? Put simply, landscape character is what makes an area unique. It is defined as "a distinct, recognisable and consistent pattern of elements, be it natural (soil, landform) and/or human (for example settlement and development) in the landscape that makes one landscape different from another, rather than better or worse". Natural England have a range of landscape character resources on their website. One activity that could be tried would be to come up with some new types of landscape character for the area a...