The land Utlisation Survey of Britain, ed L. Dudley Stamp

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rwhoyle
Posts: 39
Joined: 25 Jun 2017, 13:45

The land Utlisation Survey of Britain, ed L. Dudley Stamp

Post by rwhoyle »

LIBRAL (the Library of Agricultural and Rural Literature) would like to add to its on-line collections the reports of the Land Utilisation Survey of Britain edited by L. Dudley Stamp. Before we do so, we would welcome comments and advice on the copyright status of these volumes.

The volumes, or at least the ones I have seen, do not contain a copyright statement. This is not unusual for the 1940s when reprinting was unlikely and there was no thought of republication by new (and unenvisaged) forms of media. The Land Utilisation Survey itself had an address at LSE. The publisher was Geographical Publications Ltd.

The Land Utilisation maps are already available online and are not a part of the present project. The copyright statement on the Edina site reads as follows:

Original copyright of the underlying topographic base maps lay with the Ordnance Survey. This has since expired with Copyright of the land use data belonging to Stamp. On the death of Stamp, copyright passed to his assistant, Audrey Clark.
If you incorporate the data within your own work the following acknowledgement should be cited:
© L. Dudley Stamp/Geographical Publications Ltd, Audrey N. Clark, Environment Agency/DEFRA and Great Britain Historical GIS

The latter are noted as the funders of the scanning of the maps.

Stamp himself died in 1966 and so his writings are still in copyright. I note that his papers were acquired from by the University of Sussex from Geographical Publications Ltd. I cannot discover that this company still exists: perhaps someone could enlighten me. But if it does, the printed volumes do not indicate that they owned the copyright in the series or the individual parts of the series.

Can anyone shed any light on the identity of Audrey N. Clark?

Alternatively, it is entirely possible that copyright, in so far as it was ever discussed, remained with the individual contributors to the series, most of whom (if not all) will now be dead, and their heirs untracable.

I would welcome any information which could shed light on this knotty problem.

Richard Hoyle
August 2019

peterjatkins
Posts: 1
Joined: 03 Nov 2021, 14:16

Re: The land Utlisation Survey of Britain, ed L. Dudley Stamp

Post by peterjatkins »

Did you ever clear this up?

An enquiry to the Geography Dept at the LSE would be your best bet. Stamp was a giant of immediate post-war Geography but his approach was already out of favour by the 1960s. From time to time the LUS has popped up again as the basis for school-level fieldwork and computer-mapping projects. The maps are currently available on EDINA. See https://digimap.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2015/ ... t-digimap/

I see that Penguin published Audrey Clark's Dictionary of Geography in 2013, so they will know about her.

rwhoyle
Posts: 39
Joined: 25 Jun 2017, 13:45

Re: The land Utlisation Survey of Britain, ed L. Dudley Stamp

Post by rwhoyle »

Thanks for getting in touch.

Yes, we did resolve the question thanks ... we were put in contact with Audrey Clark's son, Giles Clark, and he both gave his consent to us scanning and posting them and gave us Stamp's own set from which to work. If you don't know LIBRAL, the Welsh Counties were added earlier this year and the home counties are scanned and will be posted shortly.

Richard

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