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Digimap Case Study:
Agricultural Changes in East Sussex from 1935-47

Author

Kate Taylor

Title

Agricultural Changes in East Sussex from 1935-47

Date

2002 - 2008

Application Area

Human & Historical Geography

Application to other subject areas

GIS

Project Type

PhD Thesis

Summary

The Second World War was a pivotal period for British agriculture. For the first time, the State intervened in agriculture in order to increase food production. This State intervention has continued in various forms ever since, and the result, arguably, has been an accelerated rate of change in the British landscape.

The key aim of this study is to reconstruct the agricultural landscape of part of East Sussex between 1935 and 1947. The 1935 data will be taken from the maps produced by Dudley Stamp’s land use survey. Luftwaffe aerial photographs from August 1940 will be used, together with RAF aerial photographs from 1947. In addition, National Farm Survey records will help to identify the types of land use in the areas of interest. The use of GIS as a tool for the integration of these disparate datasets is a crucial and innovative aspect of the study.

Datasets used

• Name: Historic OS Maps (Mainly 1:10560 County Series 2nd revision), 1st Land Utilisation Survey (LUS) field sheets, LUS published maps (6 inch and 10 mile), National Farm Survey maps and forms for individual farms in the study area, 1940 Luftwaffe aerial photograph, 1947 RAF aerial photographs.
• Source: Digimap Historic, LSE, University of Sussex Geography Resource Centre, East Sussex Records Office, The National Archive, Vision of Britain website .

Aims and Objectives

The key aim of this study is to reconstruct the agricultural landscape of part of East Sussex between 1935 and 1947.

The first objective is to provide a baseline (1935) against which subsequent changes can be measured. In addition, the use of the 1935 maps will enable the pre-war landscape in the study area to be characterised. If this is the period of the “rural idyll”, what did that actually look like?

A second objective is to identify and quantify changes in the study area over time. Much previous study of British agriculture has been qualitative in nature, whereas this study aims to quantify specific changes at farm scale.

Much debate during the last two decades has centred on the concept of “productivism” and beyond, whilst little attention has been paid to the pre-productivist era. Therefore this study will attempt a definition of pre-productivism. By identifying specific changes over time, a clear transition into “productivism” and beyond may be defined, and a pre-productivist baseline may be established against which to measure future changes

 

Methodology

The study area consists of 8 parishes in East Sussex. I used the historic OS maps from Digimap as a base. These were imported into MapInfo and I digitised over them to create a polygon layer. A copy of this layer was made for each of the three snapshot years (1935, 1940 and 1947). The land use of each polygon was then classified for each of the three years and changes between the years were noted and analysed. The 1935 classification was done on the basis of the LUS, 1940 from the Luftwaffe aerial photograph and the NFS, and the 1947 classification from the RAF aerial photos.

In addition I compared the LUS field sheets to the 6 inch and ten mile maps – when these are compared closely there are a surprising number of discrepancies between them.

Finally, as well as looking at individual fields, I also aim to look at changes affecting whole farms using the National Farm Survey data – this part of the project is still under development at the time of writing.

 

Additional Information

Map of the study area showing parish boundaries in blue and OS map tile numbers. The background mapping is the historic OS mapping obtained from Digimap