Streetmap

Hmm. Been down some time then!

I am surprised that it lasted this long, in the face of google maps (among others) - but I have a London A-Z if you want ..

Yes, it's been down since maybe Saturday or Sunday (I've forgotten when it last worked for me) so it looks as if it dead. There is a thread on financial forum The Lemon Fool about it, and several alternatives have been suggested for viewing OS maps:

They all seem fairly good, with strengths and weaknesses. About the only thing none of them seem to do is tell you the postcode of a place that you click, though all of them allow you to search for a postcode.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I like to print off a map for my passenger if we are driving somewhere new. Less of a problem now I have upgraded the car sat nav system.

Technology is accelerating too fast for my ageing brain:-(

Technology is accelerating too fast for those producing it.

I don't know however we got around in the 60's. Seriously. You'd get a set of instruction over the phone (not infrequently a pay box), scribble "turn left at the petrol station, turn right after the Fox and Hounds, etc and we are No 69".

My Grandkids get from A to B without having any idea of where they have been, and when I try to show them they don't want to know.

Must confess not used my A-Z town/city maps for a while.

At one point last year, there was something on the front page suggesting that it was for sale.

Whilst I preferred StreetMap's style of mapping, I was relieved to discover that OpenStreetMap will find a location from a postcode (on the small sample I've tried).

Adrian

Depending on what you need, openstreetmap.org may help.

-- Richard

Thanks for the links. I can contribute another:

I have a booking spreadsheet on Google Drive for my rambling club, and used a formula to convert all entered OS gridrefs to links to streetmap.co.uk. Since it's defunct I've redone the links to point to openstreetmap.org, but I first had to convert the gridrefs to lat/lon using syntax on

On 14 Jan 2026, AnthonyL wrote

My favourite former directions were the ones along the line of "carry on to where the petrol station used to be...."

Right up until I got a phone with satnav software (HereMaps) in about

Both my wife and I have paper street atlases in our cars, as a fall-back in case the car satnav or HereMaps on my phone ever fail.

Having said that, most of our journeys nowadays are on major roads such a motorways and dual carriageways, or else on roads that we know very well, so we don't always need a map and/or directions. A lot of the time in my wife's car, we set the satnav to the destination largely to give us an ETA!

It is scary that I used to set out on journeys with no idea whether there would be hold-ups on the way, apart from any advanced warning that there may be on motorway gantry signs, and no way of phoning to say "I'm stuck in a queue on the M1. I'm going to be late". It was normal in those days, although it's a lot better nowadays that we can be in touch with each other. Several times, when my wife used to have to drive into work, before working from home became the new norm, she'd phone me to say "There are warnings of delays on the M1, can you navigate a route for me" and I'd look at her GPS position (we have Google Maps location sharing turned on) so I'd tell her where to turn off and give her turn by turn instructions from many miles away. Obviously with her phone on hands-free.

I'm the driver, following the satnav, and I don't know where I've been :-)

Most of the directions I got back then were almost entirely guided by pubs. "Turn left at the Fox and Hounds and carry on until you pass the Marquis of Granby then..."

Given the number of pubs which have gone out of business since then, if GPS satellites fail we cannot return to the days of yore.

Following the satnav is uncomfortable, when you know it has played you false in the past. You never know when it will do it again.

On the other hand, when you ignore it because you know its taking you "round the houses" only to find yourself in a traffic jam because it knew other drivers were stopped...

.. but it might also be a man with a trolley full of smart phones..

The satnav in my wife's Honda has a tendency to try to get you to follow its original route even if you "disobey" it and go another way because you've seen "30 minute delay" signs on a motorway.

For the first few miles after you've turned off the motorway that it originally routed you along, I can understand it, but there comes a point when you have shown that you are established on another route and it should start comparing ETA via the original route (ignoring any traffic delay that it might not be aware of) and ETA via another route.

When we are returning to East Yorkshire from the south, the satnav often routes us M1, M18 but we often turn off onto the A46 at Leicester Forest East and then go up the A1 because it is quicker if you take into account mile-after-mile roadworks on the M1. Each time we wonder how far it will let us get before it stops trying, by more and more absurd routes, to get us back to the M1, and *finally* takes us A46, A1, M18 - and each time, we see the ETA drop by maybe 30 minutes when it finally does change.

I encountered a rather surprising behaviour with Google Maps.

Stuck in very slow-moving traffic on a motorway, it advised me to turn off at the next exit. But when I arrived at the roundabout, it directed me back on to the motorway again. I assumed that conditions had changed so that it was no longer worth leaving the motorway.

But the same thing happened at the next exit. When it advised me to turn off for a third time, I realised it was just sending me off at each exit because it resulted in me skipping forward almost half a mile past the traffic that stayed on the motorway. Leaving and rejoining at each junction was the fastest route.

-- Richard

I've always used Open Street Map. -

I've heard it said that it is this satnav behaviour that might be implicated in the crashes at M6 junctions in the Lake District where the entry and exit slip roads for a carriageway are at a cross roads with the minor road that crosses the motorway - a single bridge over the motorway instead of two bridges as you'd get with the more normal roundabout.