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Second Land Utilisation Survey of Britain

Published by:
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Last updated:
21 November 2025
Topic:
Not added
Licence:
Other Licence
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Summary

The late Professor Alice Coleman (1924-2023) directed the Second Land Utilisation Survey of Britain (2LUSB) between 1960 and 1973. This was developed from Prof Sir Dudley Stamp’s first such survey (First Land Utilisation Survey, Britain, 1931-1938) Using a clear categorisation system, with brand of pencil stipulated to ensure consistency, surveyors recorded land-use by hand-colouring OS 1:10,560 basemaps for England and Wales. As well as categorising use of land across the whole of England and Wales, where necessary, surveyors included structures missing from the OS basemaps, including residential developments, reservoirs, power stations, motorways and airports. The 2LUSB comprises nearly 7,000 Field Maps and 119 Published Maps. There is also a draft Wildscape Atlas (WA) and a generalisation of the 2LUSB data named Scapes and Fringes (S+F), each comprising maps and associated papers. Through the ONS, UKCEH and Defra the maps are now all digitised and published by the NLS.

ONS initiated the work, and remained the principal contact with the Coleman family. The family were very keen for the legacy to be published on Creative Commons terms. Kings College London (KCL, Coleman’s alma mater), had been foreseen by Coleman as the natural home for her material, but in the event, KCL elected not to follow this up and ceded priority to ONS. Defra agreed with ONS’ assessment of the significance of the legacy and provided funds through its Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment to allow for the material to be rescued, scanned and georeferenced. The material was transported to ONS Titchfield in two tranches by a cousin of Prof Coleman. ONS inventoried the legacy, amounting to over 10,000 items and 200+ categories. The UKCEH also recognised the value of the agricultural, vegetation and wildscape data and became a second keen advocate of having the material scanned and georeferenced. GENUSIT were appointed to undertake the scanning and the scanned images were forwarded to the National Library of Scotland (NLS) for georeferencing and publication. ONS, GENUSIT and NLS collaborated closely on QA to ensure the highest achievable standard of work. Attribution statement: The Second Land Utilisation Survey of Britain © Trustees of the Land Use Research Unit, 1958-1973

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Data links

Link to the data Format File added Data preview
NLS_2LUS_WMTS N/A 21 November 2025 Not available
NLS_2LUS_APIs N/A 21 November 2025 Not available
NLS_2LUS_map_viewer N/A 21 November 2025 Not available
NLS_2LUS_landing_page N/A 21 November 2025 Not available

Additional information

View additional metadata
Added to data.gov.uk
2025-11-20
Access contraints
Re-useable for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) licence. Commercial use is prohibited.
Harvest GUID
8ae96fcb-b770-4fe6-a6e7-a9bf2d797669
Extent
Latitude: 55.816° to °
Longitude: -6.236° to 2.072°
Spatial reference system
http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/EPSG/0/27700
Dataset reference date
1958-01-01 (creation)
2025-09-22 (revision)
Frequency of update
notPlanned
Responsible party
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (pointOfContact)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng
Source Metadata
XML
HTML

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Licence information

Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), Re-useable for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) licence. Commercial use is prohibited.