(Basically, think ‘a bit bigger than half a UEFA-approved football pitch’.)

And yet now, thanks to you Phil Hall, it all makes such simple sense.

Out with the acre - it seems so ridiculous that it is used.
Bring back the hectare - 100 m x 100 m!!

Great article!!

A 50 x 80 m plot would be the closest to a square using rounded numbers.

I live on a typical one quarter acre lot in a suburban sub-division. this would be a 1000 m^2 lot. I measured it once with a tape measure and it was very close to 20 m 50 m.

It seems the acre might work better with metric then with FFU.

I wonder if those who cling to FFU do so because they like the names. So why not recycle the names as slang terms for metric units. Yards and quarts can disappear and be replaced by metre and litre. There is no need to have two units for the same name.

A pound can be 500 g, a mile can be 2 km, a pint 500 mL (a good compromise between the US and UK version), a gallon can be 5 L, etc. The old units names are still found in other EU states but the old meanings are long gone. If the UK followed the practice of the Continent in regards to old unit names, then there might not be such a fuss.

Who quibbles when they go to France and gets 500 g when a pound (livre) is requested, or 500 mL when a pint is requested? So why should they quibble if it is done in the UK?

I spent a couple of days last week scanning through a number of news stories on the BBC news web site and found no consistency in the way that they use acre and hectare, but this is the same in the real world where you can drive past commercial construction sites to see billboards advertising warehouse space, some in square metres and others in square feet. If I were looking for space to run a business I’m sure I’d be quite bemused at having to keep converting from one to the other to make comparisons. On the same basis it’s no wonder that we have to use comparisons like football pitches, busses and jumbo jets so that joe public can get a feel for the size of an object… no sooner than people get used to what a metre looks like, the next thing they know is that they’re being bombarded with feet again!

I think this all goes to prove that unless we have legislation to force the use of one type or measurement, even if it’s only temporary, this mess will just continue!

All I need to know is that the definition of an acre is indeed arcane (and certainly not a nicely-square unit of area in its simplest form) and a reminder that we do have perfectly sensible - and easily-convertible - units of area: the m², the hectare, and the km².

So the question is, why doesn’t the media use hectares as a description more often? As a simple 100×100 m square, it can be easily visualised and understood. And as the author notes, 10x 10 hectares = 1 km², what could be simpler?

The abolition of the Scottish acre was part of a standardisation of weights and measures that was being carried out by the British Government at the time – the Imperial Gallon dates from that era. Unfortunately the British Government was run by people who today would be called “Eurosceptics” and who appeared to by trying to develop a “British decimal system” – why else would the gallon be defined as the volume of 10 lbs of water? The British Government cannot plead ignorance – four years previously across the North Sea, the Dutch, on realising that every city had its own “voet” (foot) and “pond” (pound), had standardised on the metric system.

I was overjoyed therefore when I learnt that the UK was to convert to metric system by 1975, and we could adopt the logical simplicity of square metres, hectares and square kilometres. What bliss!

Sadly, owing to the timidity and political cowardice of our politicians and civil servants over the last 42 years, we are still stuck with the mess of two systems of measurement, and very few people could even begin to calculate an area of land in either acres or hectares. What an indictment of a supposedly modern country!