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Yorkshire: getting a sense of place

by Sam Buckton and Juan Pablo Cordero

How connected do you feel to where you live? Chances are that you feel most connected to your local community. Perhaps you feel at home in your village, town or city. You might also feel like you belong in a wider region or even Britain as a whole, or another country, or continent. For the FixOurFood programme, a key question is how well we know our region of interest – Yorkshire – particularly from the perspective of land use and food systems. But until recently we’ve had limited access to detailed, clear information about the regional-scale picture.

FixOurFood’s metrics team has been using its AgriFoodPy package, along with data from the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and Ordnance Survey, to generate land use maps of Yorkshire. We’ve created a detailed, visually striking map that includes not only land use, but also Yorkshire’s major river systems and labels for other major ecological features, cities and towns. This allows us to see the big picture of Yorkshire’s land use, with implications for how we think about planning joined-up nature recovery or regenerative farming initiatives, for example. Particularly noticeable is the shift from arable farming in the east and centre towards more pasture-focused farming in the west, and the widespread urbanised areas of south and south-west Yorkshire.

The map also gives us a stronger sense of place. We can see the major topographical features of the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Dales and Wolds, and the edge of the Pennines, as well as the extensive low-lying areas of the Humberhead Levels, Vale of York and Vale of Mowbray. We notice how Yorkshire’s major cities grow around rivers, and how Yorkshire’s rivers ultimately flow into the mighty River Humber. We start to see Yorkshire not just as a political boundary, but as part of the Humber bioregion. We can start to imagine the great sheets of ice that carved out this landscape tens of thousands of years ago. Our food system is ultimately built from a deep geological, ecological and cultural history that led to the kinds of patterns we see today. If we’re going to achieve a food system transformation in Yorkshire towards a more regenerative future that reconnects people to their food and where it comes from, a vital step is to reconnect to our bioregional roots.

We welcome use and sharing of the map for academic purposes, as long as you include the credit statement in the caption below. For further information about AgriFoodPy, see:

Caption to be used for images: Land use map of the Yorkshire/North Yorkshire region, UK. The original pixel scale is 25 m. Image produced by Juan Pablo Cordero and Sam Buckton using AgriFoodPy and QGIS, based upon Land Cover Map 2023 © UKCEH 2024. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown Copyright 2007, License number 100017572.