#92: Dudley Stamp's Land Utilisation Survey of the 1930s

This is a cross posting from my GA Presidents blog, which includes a biography of all the GA Presidents. This post is a description of the Land Utilisation Survey of the 1930s, an exercise which was repeated by the GA twice in later decades, involving young people to survey the UK.

The idea of how the land is used, and how that has changed will be important for local field studies, and the idea of citizen science is one that was partially 'created' by this project by the GA President for 1950: Sir Laurence Dudley Stamp.

A website section on the LSE website which appeared in June 2023.

It's written by Anna Towlson to go with an exhibition of mapping earlier in the year (which I missed completely). She works at the LSE.

A reminder that Dudley Stamp was GA President in 1950, well after he started work on the survey. He was also a million selling textbook author.

It outlines the background to the survey:

Sir Dudley Stamp’s aim was to undertake a detailed field-by-field survey of England, Wales and Scotland to find out exactly what the surface of the land was being used for. The idea grew out of his work as Chairman of the Regional Studies Committee of the Geographical Association in the late 1920s. British agriculture had been facing a long and severe depression, mainly because of the increase in world food supplies and competition from cheaper producers. Many towns and cities had been growing at a steady rate since the industrial revolution, with low profits and low wages in the countryside speeding the drift of labour from the land.

Stamp envisaged the Survey as acting as, in his phrase, a “modern Domesday Book”. This comparison caused some confusion at the time, in that it led some people to think that the Survey was part of a large tax-gathering exercise. But in many ways it is very apt: it was a comprehensive national survey that was designed to be of contemporary use as an administrative tool, but it also formed a permanent record of the country’s landscape at a particular time, something that is now of enormous historical value.

Stamp envisaged that much of the field work would be done by volunteers, mainly children from local schools and colleges. He also saw the project as a national educational exercise, an opportunity to interest young people in their local environment, to develop their observational and map reading skills, and to give them what Stamp called “a training in citizenship”, with each region playing its part in a nationwide scheme.

Few people had the profile and the force of will of Stamp to pull off such an ambitious project.

In autumn 1930 he contacted the directors of education in counties across the whole of Britain to explain the project and ask them to coordinate work in their areas. He then spent the next year touring the country to talk to head teachers and education committees and taking out parties to demonstrate field work methods. He estimated that in this first year he covered almost 2,000 miles a month, with his wife acting as chauffeur. By mid-1931, the Survey was underway in most counties in England, and by early 1932 in Wales and Scotland also.

Consider these statistics:

Stamp estimated that there were about 20,000 sheets to cover, with each sheet taking two to three days to complete. Field surveying started in October 1930, but most of the work was done between 1931 and 1934. During this period Stamp continued to tour the country extensively, meeting with local officials and offering encouragement to field workers. The Survey also issued regular bulletins to the volunteers to keep them informed on the progress of the project as a whole and to clarify questions or problems with the surveying.

By January 1932 some 400 sheets had been returned, and by January 1934 this had risen to over 15,000. The bulk of the fieldwork was finished by the end of 1935, with a flying squad of surveyors, mainly geography students or former geography students from London University, finishing off remoter areas that local volunteers could not cover. This stage of the project was clearly an enormous undertaking and by the end Stamp estimated that it had involved about a quarter of a million school children, as well as teachers and other adults.

Source of text: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2023/06/09/a-modern-domesday-book/

One of the key people in the survey, and much forgotten is Eunice Wilson.

She is pictured in the blog post.

Eunice Biki Wilson, 1984. IMAGELIBRARY/755. LSE.

She started at the LSE as a cartographic assistant on the LUS. It was an interesting post that soon absorbed her talent and imagination and she rapidly developed skills that made her a pioneer of cartographic illustration. As new applications were found for the LUS in the field of land use planning, and as its work intensified, Biki eventually found herself as Chief Cartographer in charge of a new drawing office attached to the Land Use Division of Ministry of Agriculture

The survey results proved their value during and after the Second World War.

NLS has maps of Scotland and elsewhere.

The very last area to be surveyed was part of the Isle of Arran in September 1941, although all other areas were recorded by 1939. The surveys were extensively cross-checked by the team, even including Stamp with his wife as chauffeur: ‘I must have covered thousands of miles myself, often standing up on the front seat of my car with my head through the sunshine roof and a roll of six-inch maps in front of me’ (Stamp, 1948). The maps were also cross-checked with adjacent sheets when reduced to the one-inch scale.

Here's the map that features my village in Norfolk

https://maps.nls.uk/view/241043320

Key: http://geo.nls.uk/mapdata2/land_uti/key/openlayers.html

Stamp L.D. (1931). 'The Land Utilization Survey of Britain'. The Geographical Journal, 78, 40-47.

Stamp L.D. (1948, with later editions in 1950 and 1962). The Land of Britain: its use and misuse (Longman, London).