Assessing the land use of inter-war Britain: A comparison of the First Land Utilisation Survey field sheets and 1:63,360 scale maps

This paper assesses the suitability of data from the 1930s First Land Utilisation Survey maps to be used as a baseline against which to consider agricultural land use change over time in a small area of East Sussex, England. The working field sheets are compared with the corrected and published 1:63,360 maps for the same area and differences of around 15 per cent of the total area are identified. The categories of Heath and Rough Grazing, and Meadow and Grassland seem to have caused particular difficulties for the original surveyors, as it is these which have most often been reclassified between the field sheets and one inch maps. Comparison of the Heath and Rough Grazing figures with data from the agricultural census suggests that the field sheets may in fact be the more correct representation of land use at the time, and this throws into question the use of the 1:63,360 maps as the definitive version of the survey.