UK’s worst-selling map: The empty landscape charted by OS440 | Hacker News Reader

UK’s worst-selling map: The empty landscape charted by OS440

theguardian.com

84 pointsf_allwein33 comments

Americans (and probably many Europeans) might not realise how strange the idea of emptiness is to many Brits - especially those of us who grew up in the South East. For me Dungeness feels like a remote wilderness... (tries hard to avoid making a joke about Croydon)

> (tries hard to avoid making a joke about Croydon)

Less of a place, more of a punch-line? (Sue Perkins)

OK, as an American "Peep Show" fan, I'm trying to figure out why people make fun of Croydon so much. I've noticed it online recently. On the show it seems like a pretty average place.

I think a significant reason for Croydon featuring in jokes is that it's simply a 'funny' name.

Did you know that Peep Show was made in Croydon because the season 1 director wanted the show to have a slightly artsy European feel and thus wanted it to be set in a place with trams?

But every town, village, and hill in the UK has a funny name. Croydon must have something more.

It's really shit. It's an overflow town of London proper, and has no redeeming features apart from Ikea.

It's also got that milkshake place in the big shopping centre.

Also the highest rate of sexual offending in the metropolitan police district.

On the contrary, it has The Ludoquist!

2000AD had a go at Croydon too - https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_large/0/9116/3326...

In the larger picture, it's not specific to Croydon. People have variously picked on Milton Keynes, Slough, and others over the years.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_(poem)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelmsford_123

I’m definitely fascinated by this idea of an “empty zone” that “only” has a few farms and a couple of hotels.

For a truly sparsely populated landscape, you could do worse than getting a copy of the Michelin 741 (Sahara) or (a personal favourite) the Norwegian Polar Institute 1:250k maps of Dronning Maud Land in Antarctica.

I thought that 741 would just be a map of Sahara, but it actually includes most of North (where I'm from) and West Africa.

Wouldn't a Canadian or Russian map have more sparsely populated land, or am I underestimating the size of the Sahara?

-That is quite probable, I just looked up a couple of the maps I had on the shelves.

Incidentally, if we make the leap from 'sparsely populated' to 'sparsely detailed', the winner on my map shelves probably is a map issued by the GDR authorities showing Berlin. The western sectors are blank, the only legend being 'Berlin (West)'.

I believe the Sahara is larger than the contiguous United States (i.e. excluding Alaska, Hawaii, etc.)

Due to the way most common map projections work, places in northern/southern latitudes look larger than they actually are. The Sahara (9.2M km^2) is about the same size as Canada (9.1M km^2).

I only realised this as an African I took my first overseas trip to UK and Austria. It struck me just how much light and how little open spaces there are in Europe (compared to Africa). It is possible to drive a 100-200km without seeing a single electric light where I am from. I remember once sitting next to an Englishman as the plane landed at Victoria Falls airport. He remarked that the plane looks like it is going to land in the bush. I realised then that there is no building apart from the airport building for 20 km. So when you look out the window as the plane comes into land all you see is bush. South Africa is, of course, a different story.

might not realise how strange the idea of emptiness is to many Brits

This is certainly not true of all Brits, mostly Londoners think this way. "What this green empty space really needs is an exciting development of exclusive executive apartments... say, why do they call them flood plains anyway?". Most of the UK is uninhabitable, it's just the bits that are habitable are very densely packed with people, who rarely venture out of them and see the rest of the country.

Yep - cities are very densely packed, but if you live even slightly north, drive for 30 minutes away from the city and the chances are you will end up in the middle of completely empty moors or farmland, with nothing of any significance for miles in every direction.

Flood plains can be dealt with (Netherlands).

Although I grew up with pretty much your attitude, I now suspect the UK’s green belt policy caused more harm than good — it is a significant contributor to the house price problem, and creates a perverse incentive to promote unsuitable land for housing projects wherever and whenever that parcel of land can be squeezed through the rules, rather than when a natural market (or a sane government program) would.

Hmm, the green belt policy prevents companies from going "this bit of land needs concrete removing, lets just use a fresh field for our block of flats" which leads to settlements spreading excessively often encompassing large "dead" areas. House price problems are down to landlords being able to earn a living by doing nothing other than owning land.

Green belt also protects farm land, which when Brexit hits is going to be a major thing for us again; if we'd been able to sell out all our farms for housing developments then we [or the poor at least] would be a considerably more dangerous position when food import prices rise.

Of course housing developers instead of spending the money to properly develop on flood plains, if they needed to, decided as they weren't living there and the government was turning a blind eye that they could get away with it. So now we have tighter laws on building in flood prone areas -- though they still get ignored somewhat, in my area of the UK for political reasons a school has recently been built on land marked as "by law you can not build here, high flood risk" (idiots!).

Green belt is often not particularly special. You tend to get a mix of golf courses, ugly stable blocks, compound style houses, and garden centres. It is a blunt instrument to prevent urban sprawl that completely ignores the specifics of the location in question. A good development in green belt should be possible. You should be able to avoid sprawl using other methods which could be applied to the entire country. There are hundreds of towns that are sprawling that are outside of green belt. It is a terrible policy.

Also, some agricultural fields are not particularly valuable for food production or as habitat for nature. People just see green and assume that it is special and important. We need to actually judge these things in a scientific way.

Ah, you should be able to use more finesse; and probably could except property development is full of bad actors who will exploit any edge they have.

All those stables ... in my parents rural village developers put animals in a field, apply for planning for a "feed shed" or "stable". Which gives then legal reason to put in utilities. Then they need a workers cottage and in the space of 10 years you turn a £4k piece of rubbish field in to £600k+ of triple-garaged greenbelt housing.

> House price problems are down to landlords being able to earn a living by doing nothing other than owning land.

Only 21% of the UK rents. I rented for ages because houses were too expensive to buy. Then I inherited some money from my grandmother and was finally able to buy the fourth cheapest flat in the set of all in every town, city, or village within 45 minutes cycling distance of work. This was only a few years ago, and I moved out because of Brexit and became a landlord myself because the alternative was selling and I still don’t think I understand enough German to know what my responsibilities would be as a property owner here in Germany.

Rents are exactly what the market bears. Charge a million a month and nobody rents your place, charge a hundred a month and you fire your estate agent. House prices follow rather than lead rental rates: follow, because if it’s cheaper to rent then people are less interested in buying (and vice versa); not lead, because rental rates are always and solely about maximising revenue and therefore influenced only about what the competition charges, not how much the assets are “worth”. Build more houses, get more competition, rent and prices both go down.

On the other hand, speculative house purchases and people who buy with the expectation of selling for more, they did raise house prices; indeed, that’s pretty much what “speculative bubble” means.

Yes, I misspoke, my intention was "owners of land" not only renters. House flipping became the national sport for the middle-classes for some time (just hold a house for 3 months, "earn" £30k).

In addition, in my UK city high-street shop rents are through the roof because owners have no pressure to rent out - they're making money holding the premises, so they can wait years and maintain high rental. This helps kill the high-street.

I grew up in rural England and now live in Canada. While there are relatively remote areas of the UK, Canada really takes it to another level. British Columbia for example is 4 times the size of the UK but has about 1/14th the population, more than half of which is in the Greater Vancouver area which represents a tiny fraction of a percent of the total land area of the province. Even the highlands of Scotland are dense hubs of human activity compared to much of BC.

I'm an amateur radio guy in the UK. I like RF-quiet locations. Not far from me is an ancient thoroughfare up in the hills - Ridgeway. In parts it's relatively remote. I drove up there recently to try and get away from the urban noise and see what I could work / hear. Also to avoid upsetting people with big poles, wires, and lots of RF. While up there, it struck me just how busy it actually still was. When you're sitting there actively expecting it to be devoid of people, it's amazing just how many people there actually still are. So yes, I very much in agreement with this.

As a result of my experience, I'm now planning a trip up to Scotland to find somewhere actually remote to stay for a few days. I find the idea of it being just me and the airwaves very zen.

same issue, of course, for star gazing, where you need dark areas away from artificial light.