Greater London detailed map with all roads, transport, institutions, green areas

Downloadable royalty free vector artwork High-resolution PDFsLayered Adobe Illustrator file Limited Free Pass for Dynamic Mapping Suite i

Price £150

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This vector art map of Greater London is aimed squarely at professional designers using Illustrator and other Adobe vector graphics software who need an accurate, editable road map base for the entirety of Greater London. The map base contains trustworthy Ordnance Survey OpenData together with Maproom enhancements and styling, and available on Maproom’s standard royalty free licence. You can use this superb map resource in multiple ways for commercial projects ranging from TV and film graphics to printed billboards, posters, brochures, merchandise, websites, apps etc. It is suitable for using as a road map of Greater London as a whole or zooming into the detail of any part of the city.

The zoom previews on this page show the extent of the Greater London map, but our website’s zoom is unable to zoom very deep into the detail owing to the limitations of JPEG size that can be loaded onto a website. However, the example screen shots below show deeper zooms from the three styling versions that are available as high-quality zoomable PDFs and fully layered Illustrator files included in the download package.

All the elements of the map can be edited using Adobe Illustrator. Colours can be changed very quickly. Live fonts can be substituted, labels moved, layers hidden or reorganised, and extra items plotted. The versions supplied can be used as they are or as the starting point for a designer to modify or augment according to their needs.

The Greater London region of the map includes every district within the M25 and a few miles beyond, from Egham and Heathrow Airport in the west to Potters Bar in the north, Grays and Swanscombe in the east, and Leatherhead and Sevenoaks in the south.

The most notable feature about this resource map is that it contains the entire road network across Greater London. That amounts to more than 107,000 roads depicted on one base map file. We have plotted all 831 stations for National Rail, London Underground, London Overground, DLR, Tramlink and the new Crossrail Elizabeth Line, using Transport for London’s official pictograms for the transport symbols. Water features, green areas and major institutions are also included to help with orientation. Altogether there are more than 4.2 million anchor points in this vector artwork.

The sheer scope of the full road network across Greater London accounts for the high cost of this base map compared with Maproom’s much cheaper Map of Greater London districts and boroughs, which shows only A roads, motorways, boroughs and town names. It should also be compared with the cheaper London Street Map, which also has the full road network and indeed greater detail for buildings and street names, but covers a smaller area of London.

Greater London roads and road labels in this map

Note that whilst the full road network for Greater London is plotted on this map, not all the roads are labelled. It is literally impossible to scale a single piece of vector artwork to fit on a single artboard with all the 107,000+ roads of Greater London labelled legibly when output at 100%. Not only would you need a very large wall to read all of Greater London’s street names on a single image, but Adobe Illustrator could not cope with such a vast scale in a single file.

Two versions of the Greater London artwork are scaled so that the major thoroughfares are labelled. These versions are legible at large poster/billboard scalings. A third version is intended more for zoomed in scalings, in which approximately 23,000 roads in Greater London are labelled, which is about 20% of the total number of roads plotted.

Example of roads as styled and labelled around Twickenham station in each version

If you need more than 20% of roads labelled, consider our more detailed London Street Map which covers a broad area of central London. If you need more street names in a different part of London, consider our bespoke mapping service.

What you get in the Greater London map download package

There are three styled versions of this Greater London map. Each is available as a ready-to-use high-resolution PDF and a raw Illustrator file.

• Version 1 – a multi-use broad scaling colour version with major road labels over a thinly stroked road network. Labels are legible when output at 100% and above on a 2-metre width artboard.
• Version 2 – similar to v1 in greyscale. A good backdrop if you intend to plot extra elements in colour overlaying the map.
• Version 3 – thousands more road labels over a wider stroked road network. This version is best for zooming and outputting sections above 100%.

The raw Illustrator files are fully layered with live fonts for each version. The files are supplied in both Illustrator Creative Cloud (CC) format and older Creative Suite (CS) format, which handles layers differently to CC. Please contact us if you need another format – we may be able to convert the artwork for a small extra fee.

Unlike many of Maproom’s other map bases, we have not output layered PDFs with Illustrator editing features retained – this is due to unwieldy PDF file sizes. Nor have we supplied JPEGs or SVGs for this map owing to the unsuitability of those formats for supersize artwork.

All the artwork is supplied on Maproom’s standard royalty free terms and conditions.

Download sample strips from the live files here

Loading time for the Greater London map artwork in Illustrator

Owing to the vast area of road network coverage for the whole of Greater London within this artwork, the amount of vector data in the file can take a while to load. Therefore, we recommend you use a reasonably powerful computer if you are planning to edit the artwork in Illustrator. Even a mid-range computer processor may take many seconds to load and perform editing functions. The slowest layers to work on are the road label layers in version 3 of the artwork. We recommend working in Illustrator’s isolation mode when editing. If you want to focus on a smaller area of London, then it makes sense to crop the artwork first to reduce file size. However, even the standard Illustrator crop tools can be slow to perform a crop on so much data.

Cropping, scaling and labelling service

If you want to work on a smaller part of the Greater London map, we provide a cropping and scaling service at a cost of £50+vat. You can order this service either before or after purchasing the artwork. We have specialist mapping software tools that are better than the standard Illustrator crop tools. Our cropping service includes the reshaping of vector polygon and line shapes at the edges of the crop area that may be thrown out by the standard Illustrator crop tools, plus the time needed to shift labels at the edges of the cropped area so that they are readable inside the smaller artboard.

We can scale and crop the artwork to specific dimensions of your choice, e.g. A0, A1 poster formats and advise about the legibility of labels at different scales.

We can also add extra road names to smaller sections of this artwork for an extra fee.

Please contact maproom@thamesidemedia.com if you wish to purchase this map base or have a section of it tailored for your needs. We will check you have enough RAM processing power and technical ability to edit it before you buy.