The Prettiest Map of the Year

Mapping the Sea is a gorgeous interactive map of the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides.

The map was created by artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan. For the map local school pupils interviewed local fishermen and older inhabitants of the island. The map explores the rich cultural knowledge of the islanders, particularly in relation to the seas around the island.

The map

The British Library Sounds on Google Maps

The British Library Sound Maps is a nice collection of Google Maps featuring audio recordings in a number of different categories.

Users can explore traditional music on the Music from India and Traditional English Music maps. The Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust map features a number of first hand oral accounts from survivors of the Holocaust.

The British Library collection also includes sound maps of wildlife recordings and British regional accents and dialects.

In addition The British Library is currently working with the BBC on the Listening Project. The Listening Project is attempting to build a unique picture of life today by recording intimate conversations between close friends and relatives throughout the UK.

Mapping the Fonts of London

London Typographica aims to photographically record publicly available lettering and type throughout London.

The London Typographica iPhone app allows users to take pictures of fonts that they find out on the streets of London and post them to a Google Map. The map itself is a wonderful guide to the fonts used in street signs, on shop-fronts and in graffiti around the capital city.

If you click on a map marker on the map the submitted photograph of a found font appears in the map sidebar.

The Real Heat Map of England

The UK Department for Energy and Climate Change has released a real heat map for England. I say 'real' because it actually uses Google Maps to display heat use at building level throughout England.

The CEO - Heatmap shows heat demand from individual buildings throughout England and provides a range of tools to help developers and planners identify priority areas for low carbon heat projects.

The map was created using a bottom-up address level model of heat demand and does not use personal data (for example from individual household meter readings). It estimates the total heat demand of every address in England based on published sub-national energy consumption statistics.

The model seems very accurate. I notice in the streets around my location that the map shows much more energy consumption in blocks of flats than in individual homes.

Mapping the Panic on the Streets of London

In the UK a government minister responded to a threat of strike action by the country's fuel haulage truck drivers by telling the population to stock up on gasoline. The result has led to huge queues at gas stations and led to many gas stations running out of gas.

So even without an actual strike the UK government appear to have spurred panic buying and the start of a fuel shortage. As ever The Guardian has been quick to map the rising panic. It has asked its readers if they have seen cars queuing at gas stations or if they have been stocking up on gas themselves.

Here is a Google Map of the responses so far.

Strange Strolling with Google Maps

The Strange Stollers is a team of hikers, currently in training for the Oxfam Trailtrekker 2012 challenge. Oxfam Trailtrekker is a 100km trek for teams of four, over 30 hours across the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and takes place 26th-27th May 2012.

The Strange Strollers Training Map is a Google Map being used to record and document the walks that the group are undertaking in their training for the Oxfam Trailtrekker.

Using the GPS tracks, captured with a Garmin Forerunner, the map shows the routes of the group's walks. Each walk contains map markers that reveal photographs taken on the walk, which have been imported with the Instagram API or Tweets that have been imported onto the map using the Twitter API.

Car Crime on Google Maps

Car Insurance comparison website Cheapest Car Insurance has created a Google Map of UK car crime and car accidents.

One of the major factors in the price of car insurance premiums can be where you live, drive and store your car. The aim of the map is to provide a visual guide as to how high the vehicle crime rate is in your area and whether you are in an area that has a high number of road accidents.

Using the Vehicle Crime & Road Traffic Accident Map it is possible to search for any UK address (except Northern Ireland) and view nearby incidents of car crime or traffic accidents involving cars. The data for the map is for 2010 and come from the Department For Transport and the Police.

The Diamond Jubilee on Google Maps

Google and Historypin have created an interactive archive of photographs and videos from Queen Elizabeth's visits and jubilee celebrations over the six decades of her reign.

For the project Historypin want to collect as many contributions as possible, from individuals and archives all around the world. So if you have any Queen Elizabeth related photographs or videos you can add them to the Historypin - Diamond Jubilee Album.

Historypin, if you still haven't seen it, is a great collection of user submitted historical photographs and videos which can be viewed on Google Maps. One of the stand-out features of Historypin is the ability to view the photos and videos superimposed on the modern Google Maps Street View image.

Another stand-out feature is the ability to create your own album. This Golden Jubilee album is a great way to promote this feature. I'm sure Historypin will be getting a lot more UK users due to this new project.

Poverty Maps of the U.S. & UK

Last year The Guardian newspaper created a US Poverty Map.

Using data from the 2010 U.S. census the map shows the percentage of people living in poverty in each state. The map also includes layers to display the number of workers in each state earning below the minimum wage, those without medical insurance and the median wage in each state.


Today The Guardian has created a similar Poverty Map of England. The England Map, using data from credit ratings company Experian, displays poverty indicators for each of the 326 local authorities.

The map includes layers to view child poverty, the risk of long-term unemployment and low income in each authority.

The Big Lunch on Google Maps

The Big Lunch is a UK project from the Eden Project. The aim of the Big Lunch is to get as many people as possible across the whole of the UK to have lunch with their neighbours in a simple act of community, friendship and fun.

This year's Big Lunch falls on the same weekend as The Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations on Sunday 3rd June, so the Eden Project is expecting this year's event to be bigger than ever.

The Big Lunch Map is a Google Map of some of the success stories behind last year's Big Lunch event.

Search for Properties Near Your Friends

A new website allows you to search for real-estate properties in the areas where your friends are most socially active.

UK classified search engine Adzuna's interesting new approach to real-estate search mapping, Friend Map, allows users to connect a real-estate listings Google Map with their Facebook account.

The map shows the location of properties for sale and rent and also allows users to see where their friends live and check-in. The map shows the check-in data for the past year of a user's Facebook friends and also provides links to search for properties in different locations.

Using the map you can determine the areas where you friends live and play and, if you want, search for properties in those areas.

Via: The Next Web

The London Mugging Map

UK charity Witness Confident has launched a new Google Map called StreetViolence.org that allows victims of street robberies and assaults to add the crime to a Google Map. The charity believe the map will alert the community to potential risks, allow victims to post appeals for witnesses and can be used to thank passers-by who helped.

The UK government already provides a crime map for all of England and Wales, which is available at Police.uk. However Witness Confident argue that the government's map does not allow users to distinguish violent crime carried out by strangers from domestic or acquaintance violence, which leads users to believe that 'the risk to them of violent crime is worse than it is'.

Currently the map appears to be populated with 'Test Markers' which I'm pretty certain will also lead users to believe that crime is worse than it is. Presumably the test markers will be removed soon.

Spot the Film Location Competition

Telecommunication company Orange are using the Google Maps API for a 'spot the film location' competition. In On Location: Take Two, every few days, Orange is publishing a still image taken from a film. All you have to do to win is place a pin on the correct location on a map.

The first person to pin the location wins cinema tickets and all those who guess correctly are entered into a draw for a Nintendo Wii with the game Just Dance 3. I can't see any competition terms and conditions but considering the .co.uk address of the web page I would guess the competition may only be open to UK citizens.

Get an Uberlife with Google Maps

Uberlife is a website and iPhone app that helps you discover and join 'hangouts' taking place around you.

Using uberlife it is possible to find nearby events and hangouts happening right now or that are occurring soon. Users can add their likes and interests to their profile to ensure that they receive suggested hangouts from like-minded people. Users can also 'follow' other users to receive their 'hangout' suggestions.

To add a suggested hangout simply involves suggesting a venue (with the help of Google Maps), entering the time and date and adding some information about the hangout. If you find a hangout that you wish to attend you can view the location of the venue with the help of the Google Map added to the hangout page.

Interactive Bus Stops on Google Maps

Bus-Tops is a very exciting interactive art project launching in London today. Thirty red and black LED screens have been installed on the roofs of bus shelters around London. Absolutely anyone in the world can create artwork and hopefully get a chance to see their work displayed on one of the screens.

If you want to view the submitted artwork then you will need the Bus-Tops Screen Locations Map. It allows Londoner's to find their nearest Bus-Tops screen. The map also uses the Google Maps Styled Maps feature to give the map an appropriate red and blank design.

Updates Announced for UK Crime Map

The UK government's official crime map Police.uk, which uses Google Maps to map UK crime, has been visited over 450 million times and is by far and away the most popular UK government website.

Today the UK government announced that from tomorrow users of the maps will be able to get crime statistics for more locations. Currently users can search the map by postcode or by address and get results based on "an anonymous point on or near the road where they (the crimes) occurred."

As of tomorrow users will be able to search for crimes that have taken place at specific public locations, such as individual railway stations, shopping centres, airports, hospitals, parks and nightclubs etc.

Despite its popularity the map has not been free of criticism. The knowwhere blog posted a good round-up of some of the criticism the website faced in the week of its original release.

The new mapping of public spaces is also proving controversial. For example there are worries that nightclub owners may become much less likely to liaise with local police forces over criminal activity within their establishments if the result is that the clubs are then shown as criminal hotspots on the map.

Today the UK government also announced that from May users of the crime map will be able to see what happened after a crime was committed, what action was taken by the police and whether anyone was eventually convicted for the crime.

Highlighted Search Results in Google Maps

If you search for a location in Google Maps you now see the area highlighted on the map. If you zoom out a little Google Maps shows the area shaded in pink with a dotted boundary. When you zoom in on the map you should just see a dotted boundary line around the searched for area.

Another new addition to Google Maps is train information in the UK. Google has worked with thetrainline.com to allow UK users to search for train journeys across the country with information from more than than 2,500 rail stations and 170,000 routes nationwide.

To get train information in the UK you just need to enter your staring point and destination in 'Directions' and select the public transit icon.

UK Boundary Changes on Google Maps

In the UK the Boundary Commissions for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have published their recommendations for proposed changes to constituency boundaries.

The Guardian has created this Google Maps based visualisation to show the proposed new constituency boundaries and also a crude analysis of how the 2010 UK election results would have played out under the proposed changes.

The visualisation displays two synched Google Maps, the 2010 election results with the new boundaries are on the left map and the 2010 results with the existing boundaries are on the right.

The Domesday Book on Google Maps

The Domesday Book is the result of a survey carried out in England and parts of Wales in 1086. The book is one of the first and therefore oldest public records in England and therefore serves as a great resource for geographers, genealogists and historians.

The Open Domesday Book is the first free online copy of the Domesday Book. It also includes a great Google Maps interface that allows users to search for locations and quickly find references in the Domesday Book to the location and places nearby.

If you search for a location you can view on a Google Map the places mentioned in the Book in that area. If you click through on any of the referenced locations you can view an image of the original text and a breakdown of the data recorded in the Domesday Book.

London's History on Google Maps

Locating London's Past is a superb tool for exploring London's past on Google Maps.

The map allows users to visualise data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against John Rocque’s 1746 map of London. The data sets that can be viewed on the map include records of Old Bailey Proceedings, coroner's records, historical directories, plague deaths, archaeology finds and much more.

Locating London's Past has big plans for the application. They say that additional maps of London and relevant mappable datasets concerning any aspect of London's medieval, early modern, and modern history will be added to the application as they become available.