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This article presents an environmental classification of European landscapes. A fundamental problem in the assessment of landscape character is that the underlying environmental parameters vary continuously and they are the product of many interacting factors. The aesthetic appreciation of scenery, which involves perception, is nevertheless often based upon objective measurable factors, such as the length of tree lines or walls. The task of landscape description is to divide the continuous variation into classes that are convenient to handle. Such divisions are arbitrary since there is no evidence of discontinuity, except in some exceptional cases. In Britain the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, now the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has developed a Land Classification System over the last 25 years based on the construction of environmental strata from widely available cartographic data. The system was developed initially in local studies in northern England and was later tested in a regional study in Cumbria. The principle behind the classification is that the major significant ecological and landscape variables are associated with and dependent upon environmental variables.