Still Green

Over the years I've quite often found myself arguing against the notion that the country is being concreted over and there'll soon be no green space left. It's a widely held belief, and I can only conclude that the people who hold it spend their whole lives in town, have never taken a proper walk – or got lost – in real deep countryside, and never looked out of the plane window when flying over Britain. Leaving aside the conurbations, I insist, this country is still overwhelmingly green and unbuilt-on.
 I had no figures to support my case, but now the facts are available – and it turns out that Britain, even England, is vastly greener and less built-up than even I thought. Percentage of land covered by
'continuous urban fabric'? It's 0.1 percent, around a hundredth of the area covered by peat bogs. How about 'discontinuous urban fabric'? Well, all the buildings in the UK, however disposed, cover 1.4 percent of the land surface, less that the area of land that appears when the tide goes out. Furthermore, data suggests that only a fifth of the land in our towns and cities is actually built on (much of London itself, especially to the South and West, is remarkably green). Across the UK, farmland still takes up 57 percent of the total area, with 'natural' land (woodland, moors, grassland, lakes, etc) occupying another 35 percent (total 92 percent), and the rest – built-on and 'green urban' (parks, gardens, golf courses etc) – adding up to, at most, eight percent.
 You can read more about it all on this link...