Accessibility to green spaces
Quantifying the accessibility to greenspace for the most deprived areas of England
The question of accessibility to greenspace is one that has come up a number of times over the years. The focus on it was sharpened during the COVID-19 pandemic when no-one was allowed to drive anywhere and so could only walk from their front door, and it has come up again as part of the Leveling Up agenda more recently. Quantifying this is the focus of the example here.
This analysis was undertaken to quantify access to greenspace in deprived areas in England. The English Indices of Deprivation 2019 (IoD2019) was used to identify deprived areas in England, although there is no definitive cut-off at which an area is described as ‘deprived’, the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) can be used to describe how relatively deprived a neighbourhood is. In this analysis, the 300 most deprived Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs), approximately the most deprived 1%, according to IMD rank were selected.
For this example we will take a look at a cluster of them in the Manchester area.
An isochrone dataset was created to depict the area accessible from the centre of each LSOA within a 20-minute walk. This was done using a network dataset containing OS MasterMap Highways data. Therefore, the isochrones depict the area accessible by travelling along roads and paths within the timeframe, rather than the area accessible by a straight-line distance within the timeframe.
Next we can bring in the OS Open Greenspace data for the area.
This can then be filtered down so that it shows only areas that intersect the 20-minute walking isochrones and only Greenspace that is attributed as Public Parks and Gardens, Playing Fields or Play Spaces.
We can then look as whether this greenspace is accessible or not. For example there may be a large park in the 20 minute isochrone, but the entrance to it is outside of that area, so it is not really accessible. In this map we can see the access points in purple for the greenspace areas.
However these also need filtering down so that only access points within the 20 minute isochrones are visible, showing that these greenspaces are within 20 minutes walk, and also can be accessed. Of particular note, the large park area in the northwest of the map has no access points inside the 20 minute isochrone, so although it just clips the walking zone, it is not really accessible.
Finally the greenspace areas were cropped so that only the areas that were within the 20-minute isochrones were included and from these the total area of greenspace for each isochrone was calculated to give a quantifiable measure of accessible greenspace for each LSOA area, which is the question that this was looking to answer to assist with policy decisions, for example around the Leveling Up agenda.
This same principal can be applied to a wider set of data to give a broader picture of accessibility to services in an area. Here we can see Education sites and the same process could then be applied to walking access to these.
In this case we have Retail areas taken from OS NGD Buildings and again walking access to these can be assessed
Finally we have Health sites where the same could be applied. Further datasets could be access to Recreation facilities, GPs and Pharmacies or a whole range of other services to give a fuller picture of accessibility.
An alternative method for looking at accessibility would be to use a grid or hexagon method and we have a further StoryMap on this on the More Than Maps portal: ' Approaching geospatial analytics with gridded data '
This story map has been created using the following data:
- OS MasterMap Highways Network – Roads
- OS MasterMap Highways Network – Paths
- OS MasterMap Sites Layer or OS OpenMap Local
- OS Open Greenspace
- OS NGD Buildings Features
Further detail about these can be found on the OS website product pages .
The logo in the top left of this story map will take you to the main OS website homepage
More story map examples like this one can be found on the More Than Maps site.
