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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** 29 APRIL NOTE – NEW VERSIONS OF THIS MAP ARE IN THE PROCESS OF BEING UPLOADED – PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER **

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. It 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. That’s about 60 km (38 miles) east to west, and a similar distance north to south.

The most notable feature about this resource map is that it contains the entire road network across Greater London. This includes all Motorways, Primary roads, Secondary Roads, Minor Roads, Local Roads, Restricted Access Roads and Multiple Use Roads (pedestrianised roads with restricted vehicle access). We have plotted all the 800+ 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 landmarks (such as the Tower of London and British Museum) 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 much smaller area of 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.

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.

Two versions provided

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. Why is this? Read on:

We have produced two maps in the Greater London package. The most detailed is scaled to approximately 1: 14,000, and if printed in its entirety would be approximately 4m x 4m at 100%; at this scale, the labelling for local roads is 4pt (the minimum recommended size for printed maps), and even then only about 20% of London’s minor and local roads can be labelled in the available space. However all the main A and B roads are labelled, by name or road number.

The second map in the package is scaled at circa 1: 50,000, and in its entirety could be printed within an A0 format. (Note, however, that the map is approximately square in composition, so would not fill the A0 format.) In this version the Primary and Secondary roads are more prominent visually, and these roads, along with the motorways are the only roads labelled. Minor, local, restricted access and combined use roads are plotted, however. It is a better map for looking at general navigation across London, but doesn’t have the detailed labelling and visual distinctions of roads on the larger map.

What you get in the Greater London map download package

There are two 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 Primary and Secondary road labels over a thinly stroked road network. Labels are legible when output at 100% and above within an A0 size artboard.
• Version 2 – thousands more road labels over a wider stroked road network. This version is best for zooming and outputting sections at or above 100%.

The raw Illustrator files are fully layered with live fonts for each version. The files are supplied in Illustrator Creative Cloud (CC) format.

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. We recommend working in Illustrator’s isolation mode when editing, or turning off some other layers temporarily. 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. And finally, if you require additional layers, such as educational establishments or hospitals, we can add this to your version of the map – again, for an extra fee.

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