Blog

Over the last couple of years, we've occasionally had the opportunity to replace some of our map scans with newer ones. One example was the recent updating of some of our Scottish maps with newer 7th Editon ones.

Generally this works well for everyone - the newer maps are generally a little cleaner and clearer, and have more recent features on them, aiding the location of postcodes.

However, not everyone is only interested in the latest out of copyright maps we have available. Sometimes, it's nice to be able to view a map from a given date, even if that isn't the latest. With this in mind, we've added a new feature to the site. It's now possible to Browse Maps by Decade.

So, if our latest map happens to be from the late 1950s, and you want to see how things looked before some building work which happened in the early 1950s, provided we have an earlier map, you now can! Simply head to http://www.npemap.org.uk/pickDecade.html and click on your area of interest on the decade of your choice.

At this time we have almost complete 1940s coverage, a bit over a quarter of the 1950s maps, and a smattering of 1920s and 1930s maps. However, we would love to be able to fill in the missing gaps. So, if you have access to flat (never folded) ordnance survey maps from a decade where we're missing that area, we'd love to hear from you! Also, if you are able to scan in folded ordnance survey maps for a decade+area combination area that we lack, again do please get in touch.

Otherwise, we hope you enjoy seeing how things have changed, and we look forward to being able to add the first 1960s maps in January, once the Ordance Survey maps published during 1960 come out of copyright on the 1st of January 2011.

We're pleased to announce that we've recently teamed up with the OpenStreetMap 7th Edition Maps project, who are also aiming to put out-of-copyright OS maps online.

As part of this, we've been able to update around 30 of our Scottish maps with newer versions, generally replacing mid 1940s maps with late 1950s ones. Because these maps were all scanned from flat original maps, rather than folded as many of ours are, they scans are generally also a little bit clearer, and a bit better aligned. Being newer, it should hopefully be easier to find the locations of postcodes!

We've also sent over copies of our 7th Edition map scans to the OSM project, who are in the process of re-projecting them into WGS84 (the original maps use the British National Grid, as do we). They will shortly be available for OpenStreetMap users to trace features from, much as our 1940s maps have been for some time.

The next batch of 7th Editon maps leave copyright in January, so we hope to both be able to show off some more scans then!

We're pleased to announce that we finally have the legends (aka map keys) for most of our maps easily available to everyone.

Firstly, you can browse all of our map legends at http://www.npemap.org.uk/legends/, and see how the map legends have changed over time.

Secondly, for all the maps where we have a full scan of the original (including the legend at the bottom, and not just a scan of the middle part containing the map itself), we have classified the maps by the legend they contain. When browsing around the fully zoomed in map, if the map you are looking at has been classified, then the map year display in the right had pane will become a link to that map's legend. Clicking through will take you directly to the appropriate map legend.

The majority of our maps have now been classified, but for a few scanned by other contributors (especially some of the older scottish ones), then scans we have are cropped to exclude the key, so classification isn't possible. For these, you'll need to take a look at the full legends list, and spot the appropriate one based on features.

As Nick hinted at in his previous post, all the source code that runs this site is available at our public subversion repository. We think this is important, not only because we're generally open source friendly people, but because for all the will in the world, we don't really have time to devote as much as we'd like to the project (we all have full-time jobs, and other projects too).

Being custodians of public data seems like a large responsibility, though, so we feel bad about neglecting things. So how can you help?

Well, you can probably guess. If you're a coder (Perl and Python currently) and have ideas for some of the many ways npemap site (and maybe the as-yet-unstarted central freepostcodes.org.uk site) can be improved, head over to our dev site and issue tracker, start thinking about what you could do and get coding! We know that things are a little rough round the edges, but we'll try our hardest to support people developing things, so if you can't get a development environment up and running, or you would like commit access, or you would like us to push out some changes to the site, just ask us. We have a mailing list to chat on, and are always available at webmaster@npemap.org.uk.

Since the beginning of the site, we have included data from Free The Postcode, which is another site dedicated to producing public domain postcode data. These entries show up on our maps with a purple marker (our data has a green marker).

From this week, we're pleased to announce we're including data from a second public domain, collaborative postcode project. This one is the Locating Postboxes project, run by Matthew Somerville. Some of the postboxes they locate have known postcodes, and this data is shown on our site with pink markers.

As with Free The Postcode, this data is imported into our site nightly. Our importer scripts are also open source, and available from here, which people are always welcome to use and improve

By popular request, we're now providing an RSS feed of recent postcode submissions, at http://www.npemap.org.uk/allpostcodes.rss.

This feed is similar to the one provided by Free The Postcode, and is a geo-referenced (geoRSS) feed of the 100 most recently submitted postcodes.

We hope this'll prove useful for those of you who want to update their NPEMap data on the fly, and for other uses we've yet to think of. Please do get in touch if there are other useful formats you'd like to get our data in, if the downloads and rss feed don't fit your needs, and we'll see what we can do.

We're still chugging along, although we haven't had much time to devote to the project recently. We reached the 30,000 mark a few weeks ago, which shows that interest in the project is being maintained (along with our recent mention in the Reg Developer).

We've recently set up a mailing list and corresponding forum (both feed data both ways between each other so you can choose your preferred interface) for general discussion about the project, and to try and get to know some of our contributors/users. Hope to see you there!

It has been a little while since our last update, but we once again have new maps for the site.

This time, it's coverage of the Channel Islands. After much searching, we have managed to track down some 1930s maps of both Jersey and Guernsey, which are now scanned and online.

So, if you know of any postcodes for either Jersey or Guernsey, now's the time to add them in!

Thanks to hard work by Mike Calder and Andrew Rowbottom, we have now completed our mapping coverage of Scotland. You can see the full coverage best on our large map overview page.

We still need quite a few Scottish postcodes though, so now's the perfect time to enter the postcodes of places you know in Scotland!

We've added a new feature to the site, which allows you to enter your search term as part of the URL, and have that search automatically executed for you. So, if you wanted to link to our maps for a variety of different places, you can now do so with a predictable URL.

To use this, the base URL is http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/? . Then, put your search term after the ?, such as:

• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?Oxford
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?IV4 7EP
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?NT453622
• http://www.npemap.org.uk/go/?55.8592, -4.2567

As you can see, it's now possible to search by postcode, 6 figure grid reference, latitude and longitude, and place name (thanks to Geonames).