OT: BBC prog on Ordnance Survey

[Huge]

That there used to be a mine/factory/WHY? round here that no-one's quite sure where it was?

[DJC]

Can tell you quite a bit about the history of a place. Not always the obvious things like old mines, factories etc.

I am presently looking at a house that is said to have been built 1912. Which is probably right even though the surveyor, seeing a cavity wall put it as circa 1920. But the old OS map clearly show a house on site in

1900. Which is also on the map circa 1870, so it probably replaced an earlier house. Which led to a number of other investigations.

[DJC]

You can often find the latest OS plan by looking at the local authorities planning site. Most now have a map view of planning and building control applications online.

there is also

and

[tony sayer]

Ditto;!...

[newshound]

Wow, that NLS link is a fabulous resource. To repeat, don't let Scotland confuse you, it has great historic 25 inch maps of my bit of Gloucestershire.

[Bob Eager]

+1

[Bob Eager]

Although I was already sure, it was nice to see something confirmed.

Our house is named 'XXX' and the road (about 100 houses) is named 'XXX Avenue'. Sounds a bit pretentious until you realise it was the first house in the road.

[Dave Liquorice]

Coverage is a bit patchy, only about 50% of the listed maps for this area are actually online. Don't know if that is because they are still digitising or if the mapping doesn't actually exist in the first place.

It's not the most intuative of user interfaces either but that might be down to it not telling you that it doesn't have the maps of a particular box available to view it just sits there ignoring the click.

[Roger Mills]

Whilst talking about Scottish sites making English maps available, it's worth mentioning the Walk Highlands site:

Whilst aimed at walkers - particularly in Scotland - its GPS Planner tab provides access to current OS maps for the whole of the British Isles. You can zoom in to various scales of map. The most detailed is 1:25000 - so not as good as the historic 25 inch maps, but good enough for many purposes. [You have to register to get access to the 1:25000 maps, but it's free. Otherwise you can only zoom to 1:50000]

[Clive George]

Bing maps has 1:25K without registering - just choose ordnance survey maps.

(MS bought the old streetmaps site a few years back)

[Dave W]

So does streetmap.co.uk Map type automatically changes with zoom level, and the OS 1:25000 is the next one down to one with road names.