Streetmap

I was once (in the '70s') told to "turn right 5 miles before you reach Knowle".

That's fair enough if there's a prominent sign saying 'Knowle 5 1/2 miles' with a significant right turn visible in the distance. It's possible.

If I'm about to travel anywhere unfamiliar I'll run through it in Street View first, particularly approaching turns so I can see what the signposts and buildings, if any, look like. It does then feel at least a bit familiar when I do the real thing.

Some decades ago unmanned level crossings posted a sign saying “Wait while lights flash” - which means different things in different parts of the country. The signage was changed to something unambiguous.

I will treat that with the contempt it deserves.

In the 70s, there was no such thing as Streetview!

Yes I do that. I try to find the house that I'm going to on Streetview, which sometimes involves interpolating from a nearby house that has its number displayed in a way that Google hasn't blurred out.

(Noting the shift in timescale) I do that if I am about to tow the caravan to some site I haven't previously visited. Taking a wrong turn is much more of a problem if you are towing.

Over the years, I used various versions of Autoroute, right from the DOS one with primitive graphics. I took printouts on my journeys, which worked well enough at the time.

What really got to me was that, despite the improvements, each version took a step backwards.

Each new release, whilst it may well have great new features, seemed to throw out or screw up something from the previous version.

I finally decided that I needed a sat nav in the car was after a frustrating hour spent in the environs of M1 J21, tying to find a parcels depot with the aid of an A-Z. This was a complete nightmare, not helped by vertical road separations which were not clear on paper

I have had a couple of TomToms, which worked well for me. My present Ford has a built-in system which has the advantage of being integrated, and having a large display. It performs pretty well, but the interface is not very friendly for setting destinations, and it is not possible to load any third party datasets.

This car is really only used occasionally these days, as there is also an EV in the household. Where we need live traffic information, my partner gets the route on her phone, and uses it to inform any choices that we need to make.

Whenever it is necessary, we generally get a OS map, and the map book lives in the car.

Chris

Ah, the dreaded "West Riding" meaning of "while". In the West Riding it tends to be used to mean "until" rather than "during". So "wait while lights flash" has a rather different meaning...

I remember when I was growing up in Leeds, my friend was forever pestering his mum for some thing to eat. I can "hear" her voice even now, 55 years later: "No, you *can't* have a biscuit. Wait while tea-time."

About 15 years ago my wife bought a program called Viewranger and shelled out a fair amount of money for a copy of all the 1:50,000 and

It was invaluable for plotting routes and for navigating on smaller roads that we might never have investigated for fear of getting lost. It had the ability to record a track of where you'd been, which was novel when we first got it, even if it's commonplace nowadays. The fact they you get a big "you are here" cross that moves as you travel is just as wonderful now as when we first saw it.

Viewranger was bought up by a competitor who immediately killed it off because it competed with their own similar but inferior product. But in buying Viewranger, they'd also bought a large user-base of people who wanted the new company to honour the original lifetime purchase of the OS maps. And to their credit they did honour it: those former users of Viewranger have a perpetual licence to use OS maps whereas everyone else has to pay an annual subscription.

We use two OS map apps. One has offline maps (takes a fair amount of storage) which means you can see the maps even when there's no internet, whereas the other product needs internet to load each successive tile as you move around the country.

Outdoor Active is the one which needs internet. I think that's the one that supplanted the much-missed Viewranger. OMN is the one that allows offline maps. They each have strengths and weaknesses. Outdoor Active automatically flips from one type of map to another (road atlas to

This is an anecdote from ICL in the early 1970s. 'New Range' was to become the 2900 Series (of which I know quite a bit).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- t a meeting of the "New Range Upper Sub-Range Primitive Interface Interpretive Committee", chaired by John Bowthorpe, there was a lengthy debate one day about the proposed implementation of the SWEQ (Scan While Equal) and SWNE (Scan While Not Equal) instructions. Near the end of the meeting, one of the engineers got up and said that he was happy with the implementation but unhappy with the names of the instructions.

He explained that he came from Oldham, and that in parts of Lancashire "while" meant "until", so that any Lancastrian engineers and programmers would interpret the instructions in exactly the opposite way to that intended. An action was duly placed for the Architects to rule on this.

At the next meeting, the chairman came to this action and solemnly declared that the matter had been duly considered and the instruction names would remain as they were. It was felt that "ICL specifications could not be written to cater for ethnic minorities".

In my part of the world (Herne Bay in Kent), also at least the parts of Brighton I've looked at the house numbers are on the map.

Or in Ireland -

"Now if you were on xxx road it would be easier to give you directions to where you want to go"

You can't beat the Irish take on things.

I remember once going to Dublin on business. One of the people I'd gone to meet drove me to my hotel. We got hopelessly lost in the maze of streets, so she called across to one of several "auld fellers" who were sitting outside a pub. One of them came across and she asked him "Do you know how to get to X Hotel?" He went back to ask his mates and there was an animated discussion.

"Well, Seamus says you turn left and then third right. Donal says you go right and then left. Paddy says you go second right. But they're all wrong, every one of them. You just keep going straight on and you can't miss it."

It turned out that *none* of them had got it right. But they tried! They all tried their best to help. Over here, you'd be lucky to get a "Sorry, dunno, mate."

Yes, I had a look at them, thanks. Those that looked like an OS map showed there was no road where I live, not even a clear route between the houses.

On 15 Jan 2026, Andrew wrote

I heard that one as:

"How do I get to X?" "Oh, you don't want to be starting from here."

'Sure, if I was going there, I wouldn't be after starting from here.' is correct ethnic Irish.

That is indeed excellent advice, although it's not as bad as it used to be since the large influx of Eastern Europeans seemed to go there as house prices were cheap (for good reason).

Pete

Would you believe that in the last couple of days,

It's good because I have a document which uses a number of Streetmap URLs with arrows that point to specific locations on OS maps, and I was trying to work out how to make any of the substitute sites point to arrow-marked places.

WOW! Thanks for the heads-up. I'd given up on them and spent time reworking my rambling club Google Sheet formulas using

=importdata("

to convert the OS gridrefs to lat/lon via , and send the results to OpenStreetMap and GoogleMaps which don't take OS refs.

Perhaps I'd better not change them back to streetmap.co.uk until we hear what's going on.