A puff for a map

Thinking it prudent to check that our big Sainsbury's was up and running after all the goings on yesterday, I asked Bing, who turned up reference 1.

Which comes with what to my mind is a rather good quality street map showing you where this store is. Up to, say, the quality of the printed AZ of London of old, with judicious use of colour being a big part of this. Which is rather better than gmaps - although one can understand where they are too: they are producing a uniform street map of the world, for which the sort of trim added to a printed street map of a relatively small area is not practical. It may also be the case that gmaps is quite old now as well as quite big, so a major overhaul, while perhaps desirable, would be very expensive. Too expensive for a service which is provided free at the point of use.

These new-to-me maps come from the open street maps organisation, to be found at references 2 and 3. An organisation which appears to involve our own UCL and a number of web service providers - in particular Fastly of reference 5 and Bytemark of reference 6 - and which looks to have been going for near twenty years. But headquartered in Cambridge, UK.

The example snapped above is of Bank Street, NYC, the place that featured at reference 4 back in 2021. I shall see if I can still put my hand on the book in a bit. I have not yet found anything like Street View, but maybe that is where things start to get really expensive.

That apart, I have learned of an annual conference called 'State of the Map', this year in Richmond, Virginia, a bit to the south of Washington DC, and to be found at reference 7. Maybe it will come back to the UK. Maybe it would be a bit like the Wikipedia annual jamboree called 'Wikimania', which I turned up for at the Barbican back in August 2014. Where I got to visit the impressive roof garden, not generally open to all comers. But that was quite a long time ago now, so perhaps it is already too late.

Maybe I shall find a bit of time to poke these good looking maps around a bit more. Add to my favourites even.

References

Reference 1: https://www.openingtimesin.uk/sainsburys-epsom-kiln-lane.

Reference 2: https://www.openstreetmap.org.

Reference 3: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/bank-street-nyc.html.

Reference 5: https://www.fastly.com/.

Reference 6: https://www.bytemark.co.uk/.

Reference 7: https://2023.stateofthemap.us/.