Abstract Recent UK Government guidance has emphasized the need to take account of landslide problems in the land use planning process ( DoE 1990 , 1996 ). To assist the implementation of this policy, the then Department of the Environment (DoE) commissioned a number of demonstration projects to develop approaches to assess the potential for landsliding and to identify the best ways of in corporating this information in the planning process. In the UK there are many situations where historic development has resulted in the concentration of urban development and infrastructure on unstable ground. This is often on a scale such that total avoidance or abandonment are out of the question, as is recourse to large-scale and inordinately expensive engineering solutions (e.g. the Bath area, Lyme Regis, the South Wales valleys, etc. ( Jones & Lee 1994 )). Under these circumstances, detailed knowledge of slope instability is required so that pragmatic policies can be developed to assist communities to reduce risk. This approach has been pioneered by the detailed study of the Undercliff at Ventnor, on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England ( Lee & Moore 1991 ; Lee et al.1991a , b , c ; Moore et al 1991 ).