Land use in England (2022)

[This is a archive post, previously released on LinkedIn]

The latest survey of land usage in England was released this week [27 Oct 2022]. Highlights below.

Key changes since the last survey in 2018:

• Areas of natural land decreased by 20%, a loss of 159k hectares
• Areas of water dropped by 17.5%, a loss of 31k hectares
• Residential areas increased by 7.7%, 11k hectares
• Landfill and waste disposal increased by 5.4%, 100 hectares

Headline numbers:

• 63% of land is in agricultural use
• 20% is forest, open land and water
• 5% is used for residential gardens(!)
• 1.3% is for housing
• 0.4% is for industry and commerce

Total classified land usage has decreased from 13.25m hectares to 13.04m… Has England shrunk by 1.6%?! Presumably not: methodology information is limited on the source web pages, but it’s more likely that the change is due to the technical definition of the classifiable land. However, coastal erosion does occur…

Data from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/land-use-in-england
Analysis and visualisation by me.