Planning designations in London

Why the UK edition has no zoning plate as such, and what the ZONING, DISTRICTS & ZONES and PLANNED FACILITIES plates show for a site in London.

Overview

The UK has no zoning. There is no map that fixes the use, coverage, plot ratio or height of each site. Development is decided through planning permission, against the borough's Local Plan and, in London, the London Plan. The Korean, US, Japanese and Spanish editions draw zoning districts; the UK edition draws the designations that apply in London instead:

• ZONING: London Plan strategic designations (GLA)
• DISTRICTS & ZONES: heritage and view designations (planning.data.gov.uk, Historic England, GLA)
• PLANNED FACILITIES: public sites (schools, universities, health, parks, transport, railway land)

These designations exist in London only. Plate names stay the same in every edition so that a set reads the same.

ZONING: London Plan designations

The designations overlap: an Opportunity Area can lie inside the Central Activities Zone, and Metropolitan Open Land inside either. Larger areas are drawn below and smaller ones on top, so every area can be selected in the «Details» window. Land with no designation is left blank. In the 800 m samples, the Central Activities Zone covers 99% of Bloomsbury and 46% of King's Cross, and Opportunity Areas 21% and 28%.

The «Site overview» lists the designations that overlap the site by share of the site area, and states that there are no fixed coverage or plot ratio caps (see Site overview).

DISTRICTS & ZONES: heritage and views

• Listed building (point): listed buildings that have no outline in the data are drawn as small octagons (5 m radius) at the listed point
• LVMF: protected vistas of the London View Management Framework (2010 adopted version). The viewing corridor is the protected strip; the wider setting area is off by default
• Article 4 direction areas mostly coincide with conservation areas, so they are off by default
• Designations that have ended (an end date in the data) are left out. Near-identical duplicates of the same type are kept once
• LVMF corridors and Article 4 areas overlap each other heavily, so each of those types is merged into one shape before drawing

In the 800 m Bloomsbury sample there are 12 conservation areas covering 75% of the circle, 465 listed building outlines, and 7–8 LVMF corridors covering 43–52%. At King's Cross, 10 conservation areas cover 43%.

PLANNED FACILITIES: public sites

School, university, health and transport sites are OS OpenMap Local functional site polygons. A school site is kept only if an open school in the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register lies on it; an open school with no site polygon is drawn as a 20 m circle. Parks and open space come from OS Open Greenspace, and railway land from OpenStreetMap.

Limitations

• A blank area is not proof of no constraint. The national planning data platform describes its data as incomplete in places, and boroughs publish at different times
• Not included: Local Plan site allocations, tall building zones, tree preservation orders, flood zones, the LVMF 2026 consultation draft, and borough-only designations not in these datasets
• Areas only. The plates do not show plot ratios, heights or the threshold planes of LVMF protected vistas
• Boundaries are converted from British National Grid to WGS84 (about 2 m accuracy)

Data sources

Related guides

• Site overview
• The 24 plates
• Data sources

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