The RERC consortium also proposed a major stream of work based on the underlying (1 ha cell) grid used for the identification of settlements and the ‘sparse/less sparse’ context measure in the definition of rural areas.
The advantages of developing evidence on rural areas in such a high degree of detail are twofold:
- it enables analysis of data on rural settlements themselves – i.e. rural towns, small and large villages and hamlets – rather than of the larger census areas in which such settlements, or parts of them, are located,
- small grids can be built more accurately into the often intricately shaped territories that constitute different types of ‘natural’ rural policy area than can census units.
Assigning data to 1 ha cells and then building cells to policy areas has, for example, enabled us to examine travel to work flows into, out of and within, the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and to compare settlement structure and population change among the National Parks. Such information is important to the study of, for example, the determinants of house prices in rural policy areas.
A finely gridded basis for storing information is also useful for integrating data of different sorts, on different subjects and for differently sized and shapes of areas. Grid-based analyses have been extensively used in the first phase of RERC work by colleagues based in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield. The techniques have been used to explore issues raised in Lord Haskins' report on modernising rural delivery and to examine the geographical characteristics of rural housing markets in detail.