Natural England has launched a new interactive mapping tool to help identify areas that could benefit from new or extended landscape designations, including National Park and AONB status, as well as potential new approaches
On Thursday 20 October 2022, Natural England launched an interactive All-England Strategic Landscape Mapping tool.
Aiming to reflect the spirit of the 1947 Hobhouse Map, which led to the establishment of the first National Parks 70 years ago, the tool seeks to:
- help identify areas that could become new or extended National Parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs); and
- identify places that could benefit from alternative landscape actions and approaches
The project is part of the protected landscape programme Natural England first announced in June 2021. In its recent response to the 2019 Glover Review of designated landscapes, the UK Government stated that Natural England’s ‘ambitious new landscape designation programme’ would ‘enable a more collaborative process to designate new National Parks and AONBs’.
The final mapping tool includes 55 layers, grouped into nine factors: six Natural Beauty factors and three additional factors:
- Landscape quality
- Scenic quality
- Relative wildness
- Relative tranquillity
- Natural heritage
- Cultural heritage
- Access diversity and inclusion
- Democratic landscape value
- Education
To inform the need for alternative landscape approaches are 22 layers, grouped by two themes and six sub-factors:
- Health and wellbeing
- Access, diversity and inclusion
- Risk
- Under-represented landscapes
- Natural beauty opportunity
- Nature opportunity
