Map of NZ airstrips
 

I have just seen this remarkable map via a link on the Kiwi Pilots FB page:
https://koordinates.com/from/data.li...z/layer/50333/

It shows all the airstrips in New Zealand. There are 3179 of them in a country that is about the same size as the UK*

A lot of those are top-dressing (ag aircraft) strips, but even if you assume only one-third of them are "normal strips", that is still a hell of a lot!

Hw many strips are there in the UK?


* It's 8% larger.

One of the flightguides a year or so ago (can't remember if it was Pooley's or AFE) had over 800 UK airfields including strips. On top of that I'd estimate there are at least a couple of hundred private strips not in any published guide.

That map of NZ might well be based upon the openstreetmap project. I remember someone must have worked hard, there, to add all those airstrips - an impressive number indeed. My own list of European airfields, consolidated from several public sources and regularly updated, counts a total of 994 aerodromes in the UK, but that includes 213 closed fields.
The figures given by @BossEyed above look quite credible to me.

I believe the data base that shows all those NZ airstrips predates the openstreetmap project by many years. The airstrip information is part of Land Information New Zealand's survey data. Old 1;50,000 charts show very many airstrips, probably all the strips in the link above. These charts are viewable online by going to the LINZ website and zooming in on a selected location.

Almost certainly a significant proportion of the strips shown have been disused for many years. No maintenance will have been carried out with the result that the strips may be difficult to identify from the air and may have disappeared altogether. Equally it is likely some new ones have been set up. LINZ is a mapping operation not an aeronautical information service .