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Blog posted by: Elaine Nicholls, Spatial Data Analyst, GeoPlace, 01 September 2020.

Greenspace is essential for our well being. Being in the open air contributes to our mental and physical health and, in the UK, we’re fortunate to have a great deal of green space we can get to relatively easily.

The Accessible Natural Greenspace Standard (known as ANGST), recommends that everyone should have access to at least two hectares of green space – that’s an area about the size of two rugby pitches – no more than a five-minute walk from home. It goes on to make three other recommendations. People should have access to:

• at least one accessible 20 hectare site within two kilometre of home
• one accessible 100 hectare site within five kilometres of home
• one accessible 500 hectare site within ten kilometres of home.

Here at GeoPlace, our teams use data in many different ways to create compelling data visualisations. We wanted to show greenspace in Britain in context, to see how near (or far) away those greenspaces are from locations in five major cities. We also wanted our visualisations to be detailed and useful, and for the insights to be as accurate as possible. For that reason, we used Basic Land and Property Units (BLPUs), which give us data at an individual property level. This is much more accurate than using postcodes.  

Households v postcodes

We started by using OS Open Greenspace data to identify the greenspace and see how the location of the BLPUs matched up against the ANGST criteria. Most similar work uses postcodes as an identifier, but this can create generalisations and we wanted to avoid that problem. Multiple houses can share the same postcode, so neighbouring houses might have different access to greenspace – we get more nuanced detail from BLPUs.

This street view shows the variation that can occur at street level. Despite being on the same street, some of the houses had good accessibility to green space but others met none of the criteria. A street may have a variety of postcodes, but BLPUs give us insights at individual property level:

Source: Google maps, 2019

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