Evening crowds outdoors: pitches, parks, catchments

How a PPG17 open space assessment worked

PPG17 was the UK planning guidance that asked local authorities to audit open space and then set local standards for it. The method ran in two halves. First an audit: every green space above a size threshold was mapped, typed by function (parks, natural green space, play, allotments, pitches) and scored for quality and value. Then an assessment: the audit was compared against the population it served, and the gap became a provision standard, expressed as hectares per thousand people or as a distance to the nearest site. That thread continues in When the party outgrows the kitchen.

The important part for anyone holding an event outdoors is that the standard was never national. Each authority wrote its own, based on its own audit, which is why a field that is comfortably adequate in one district is overcrowded in the next. The PPG17 open space assessment was a local instrument, and the numbers only mean something next to the map they came from. A longer note on the same subject sits in A twelve person night on a six person table.

What do surveys and audits of local provision actually measure?

An audit measures ground, not demand. Surveyors walk the site, record the surface, drainage, slope, access points, changing provision, lighting and the condition of goalposts or play equipment, then score it. A pitch that floods in February is downgraded even if it looks fine in July, because the audit is meant to describe the worst realistic week, not the best one.

Surveys of provision also count what is already booked. A playing pitch strategy will ask leagues how many hours they use, when, and how far they travel to get them. That travel data is what turns a set of fields into a catchment. Without it, a council knows it has pitches; with it, the council knows those pitches serve teams from three neighbouring wards and are therefore carrying more than their own population.

Quality scoring matters as much as quantity. Two sites of identical acreage can hold very different evening crowds if one has parking, a pavilion and a lit path to the road and the other has a single gate. The audit records this, and the assessment decides whether the shortfall is land or infrastructure.

How is open space and its catchment mapped?

Mapping starts with boundaries. Each site is drawn as a polygon, tagged with its type and its owner, and given a catchment: a straight-line or walking-distance radius that represents how far people will reasonably travel to use it. Parks and play areas usually get short catchments, a few hundred metres, because they are used casually and often. Playing pitches get longer ones, because a team will cross a district for a fixture.

Those radii are then laid over population data, usually at output area level, and the map shows which households fall inside a catchment and which fall in a gap. Gaps are the finding that drives spending. A cluster of new housing with no polygon within walking distance is a defensible case for a new site; a site with a large catchment but poor quality is a case for refurbishment instead.

For an evening event, the catchment map answers a practical question: how many people can arrive without a car. If the site sits inside a dense catchment, the crowd will walk in and the pressure falls on gates, lighting and paths. If it sits outside one, everyone drives, and the limit becomes parking and the exit onto the road, not the acreage.

Where does the crowd actually stand?

The capacity figure that matters is rarely the total area. It is the usable area after drainage, slope and wear are taken out. A pitch strategy will distinguish between pitches that are playable year round and those that are only fit in a dry spell, and the second category should not be counted when you are planning a fixed date.

Then there is the question of overlap. A park that hosts a Saturday league, a Sunday junior session and an evening training slot is not three separate venues; it is one surface being asked to recover between uses. Audits record this as capacity pressure, and the assessment turns it into a recommendation: more pitches, better drainage, or a rotation that gives the ground a rest.

If you are organising an evening outdoors, ask for the site's audit score and its pitch classification before you ask about the field size. The score tells you what the ground will be like after a wet week, and the classification tells you whether you are competing with fixtures that were booked a season in advance.

Who does this work, and what happens to the records?

In the UK the work is done by council leisure and planning teams, often with external consultants, and the methods are shared across the sector. Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport set performance indicators for play; Fields in Trust publishes benchmark standards for green space; CABE Space ran a children's play programme with strategic enablers in local authorities. The audits themselves are public documents, usually sitting in a council's evidence base, and they are the reason a planning application for a new pitch has to argue against a number rather than an opinion.

Some of the consultancies that produced these studies have since closed. Ashley Godfrey Associates, a planning and leisure consultancy based in Ware, Hertfordshire, worked on open space and playing pitch studies for councils including Harrow, Erewash, Medway and Cambridge before closing in 2019 when its principal retired. Its project pages, including the Harrow open space study and the Nene Park play trail, remain archived, and they are a useful record of how the method was applied in practice rather than described in guidance.

That matters for anyone reading an old assessment today. The PPG17 framework was replaced by the National Planning Policy Framework, but the audits it produced are still the baseline many authorities measure against. If your site's catchment was drawn in 2009, the housing inside it has changed, and the capacity figure has not.

What to check before you book the field

Ask four things. The date of the last open space audit and whether the site was included. The pitch classification, which tells you if the ground is playable year round. The catchment, which tells you how the crowd will arrive. And the current fixture load, which tells you whether the surface has had a rest.

None of this replaces walking the site. Drainage, tree cover and the state of the gate are visible in ten minutes. But the audit and the assessment are what turn that walk into a number you can defend when someone asks why the crowd has to stop at four hundred.

Filed under Hosting. Published September 15, 2026.