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Subject: Unpublished Stamp Land Use Survey maps now on-line
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005
From: Humphrey Southall <[log in to unmask]>
To: A forum for issues related to map & spatial data librarianship
<[log in to unmask]>
L.Dudley Stamp's Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain mapped land
use right across Great Britain. Schoolchildren did the detailed
survey work, plotting local land uses onto six inch to the mile maps
which were sent back to Stamp's base at the LSE. The plan was to
publish the results using OS Popular Series One Inch maps as a base,
but lack of funds meant that 56 of the one inch sheets, covering much
of upland Scotland, were never published.
Stamp's team did create a set of very carefully hand-painted sheets
covering these areas, and deposited them with the Royal Geographical
Society in London (RGS Control No. 568206), but this still meant that
they were very inaccessible to people in the areas covered.
I am pleased to announce that geo-referenced images of these sheets
are now included in the Vision of Britain web site. When we went live
last year, the site included two complete sets of one-inch maps of
Britain, the 19th century First Series and the 1940s New Popular
Edition, funded by the lottery, plus a set of all the published Stamp
maps, funded by the Environment Agency and DEFRA.
This addition was obviously not done with lottery money. I am
grateful to the Frederick Soddy Trust for funding Paula Aucott to do
the geo-referencing work; to Dan Re'em and Imperial Mapping Ltd for
scanning the maps for us at no charge; to the Royal Geographical
Society for providing us with access to the maps; and once again to
the copyright holder, who has been enormously generous and helpful.
Adding the unpublished sheets means that you no longer get blank
areas when you zoom in on highland Scotland, and it also means that
in a sense the whole of Stamp's survey has finally been
published. To see the maps, you can go direct to the "map library"
part of our site via:
http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk/maps
If you like, you can immediately start zooming in on your chosen
area, but at some stage you will need to go to the bottom right of
the page and select "Land Use Map". We have not figured out how to
provide a key on the same page, but one is available here:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/footer/doc_text_for_title.jsp?topic=sources&seq=6
Of course, the Vision of Britain site is designed to present small
parts of the LUS maps to people interested in local history -- along
with everything else we know about a particular locality. I am
afraid I cannot offer assistance to academic researchers wanting
direct access to whole maps, but the plan is for the Stamp maps to be
made available for academic use through EDINA.
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
Web site: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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