Recycling old football pitches

In honour of the 2014 World Cup final, BBC’s Countryfile team recently met the locals who have turned the old Swansea football pitch, Vetch Field, into a haven of growing and community spirit.

A year long project that started in September 2011, commissioned by Adain Avion, Cultural Olympiad Wales, Vetch Field was a defunct sports and music venue has been converted into a community garden/allotment. 

Over 100 Beds fill the 2,500 metre sq. site, where members of the community, families, organisations, churches, retirement centres and charities can grow their own food. The site also contains a kitchen, numerous communal beds and polytunnels. The gardeners care for the site, learn bee keeping, and cob oven building skills as well as keeping chickens and preparing food in the kitchen.

The garden has become a centre of community, where cultures, neighbours and families meet and tend their plots, swap recipes and share meals.

As part of our DMGT Green Week, we took this opportunity to look into our data. Did you know…

• We hold over 300 planning application features relating to the development of allotments
• Our local plan data identifies over 2,100 land allocations for allotments, existing and proposed
• OS Mastermaps identify almost 18,000 allotments across Great Britain
• Our Points of Interest Data shows:
• Over 2,500 points of interest that detail horticultural services
• Over 7,800 points of interest that detail gardening, landscaping and tree surgery services
• Over 1,800 community projects and networks

Plotting the UK’s Ancient Woodlands

In an article by the BBC’s Science and Environment team this week, it was reported that the “scale of ancient woodland being lost to development is being made worse because of a lack of accurate data.”  

In the report, the Woodland Trust claimed that it is not possible to identify how much ancient forest has disappeared in the last decade.  

“Our data supports The Woodland Trust’s position that ancient woodland has been disappearing over many years,” confirms Chris Stubbs, Managing Director – Environment & Mapping at Landmark Information Group:  “However, it is not correct to say that data isn’t available to demonstrate what is being lost each year.  Here at Landmark, we have the data available to show designated ancient woodland, both historically and today, and can overlay a range of datasets to show how it has changed over the years.” 

By overlaying historic maps with ancient woodland maps (dating as far back to 1600 in England and Wales, or 1750 in Scotland), it is entirely possible to visualise any changes that may have occurred. And by overlaying data from current and approved planning applications we can identify if proposed or approved future developments put more ancient woodland at risk. 

Continues Chris: “The data is out there. Our historic mapping is able to reveal the changes to the natural landscape, with the impact of development being clearly visible not only for ancient woodland, but also on green belt, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, nature reserves, country parks, and many other notable locations.”

Landmark has an unrivalled source of large-scale current and historic digital maps together with high quality environmental risk and planning information.   Its digital archive of historical maps is the UK’s largest and most comprehensive, comprising of over one million historical maps.

 

 

 

Example Ordnance Survey maps showing an area located in Reading (NGR 466070, 154481)

Find out more about our data and services at:

www.landmark.co.uk

www.promap.co.uk

www.envirocheck.co.uk