Maproom News

Also new – Live Views for the Locations Plotter and Quick Select Postcodes can be shared with password protection.

All 33 London borough maps are now available individually or in a discounted bundle set. Scaled for legibility at A1, they show a wealth of detail and isolate the shape of each borough with a semi-transparent mask. Supplied in PDF, SVG and Adobe Illustrator formats, they are perfect for use as they are, or for graphic designers to edit.

We were pleased to see Maproom’s Greater London map base put to good use within this week’s episode of Silent Witness. (All of our downloadable maps can be used for set dressing and TV graphics.) Here, the fictional pathologists are plotting points and trails in Southeast London to help catch a serial killer.

We’ve added an auto-calculating A to B driving route plotter with directions for businesses that need to calculate service charge areas and delivery routes in and around the UK’s Low Emission Zones. See at a glance if your customer’s postcode is in a Low Emission Zone and / or if your route takes you into Greater London’s ULEZ or 13 other Low Emission Zones around UK cities.

For more information and access to this map see Clean Air Zones / ULEZ / Low Emission / Congestion Charge + postcodes + live traffic interactive map

We have updated all our Local Authority map bases in line with changes that have come into effect on 1 April 2023. As far as we can see, we have actually beaten the Government itself in issuing the new boundary data!

The changes are as follows:

Cumberland – formerly Allerdale, Carlisle, Copeland

Westmorland and Furness – formerly Barrow-in-Furness, Eden, South Lakeland

North Yorkshire – formerly Craven, Hambleton, Harrogate, Richmondshire, Ryedale, Scarborough, Selby

Somerset – formerly Mendip, Sedgemoor, Somerset West and Taunton, South Somerset

We sell two vector art packages for the Local Authorities: one juxtaposed with postcodes and the other without. Both are bundled with a premium pass for the Dynamic Mapping Suite, which contains interactive online maps of the new Local Authorities with advanced search. Users can colour and caption the Local Authorities online with their own data.

If you have data you want to feed to the old Local Authorities, before the April 2023 mergers in Cumbria, Yorkshire and Somerset, we have included an older version in both the download package and in the spreadsheets to polygons system in the Dynamic Mapping Suite. This is handy if, for example, your data relates to the 2021 census.

For more details see UK local authorities maps.

The United Nations have accepted Turkey’s official name spelling change to Türkiye with immediate effect, and Ukraine and Moldova have been accepted as EU candidate countries. Therefore we have updated our full set of Europe, EU and world maps to reflect these developments.

We were surprised to be contacted by quite a few people requesting a map showing the Elizabeth Line in geographical context. Like all of the UK’s official free rail maps, Transport for London’s map of the Elizabeth Line, available here, is meant for schematic visual clarity in route planning. It doesn’t attempt to show distances or other geospatial relationship. However, for town planners, property developers, marketeers and numerous other businesspeople and public sector organisations, it is useful to see the fuller picture of the Elizabeth Line. We have made the map for such people, and we have made it editable (ideally with Adobe Illustrator) and royalty free to use.

Purchase the new map on this product page: Elizabeth Line map with rail and road networks.

Today a new law brought by the Islands (Scotland) Bill has come into force to ban public bodies from using maps that display Shetland in a box rather than in its natural geographic position 150 miles north of the Scottish mainland. 

The BBC article about the law, instigated by Islands Lib Dem MSP Tavish Scott and supported by many who live on the Shetland Islands, uses a version of Maproom’s Outline Map of Scotland to illustrate the news item. Now, whilst we are delighted to spot one of our maps getting a lot of attention, we want to point out that this map and most of our other Scotland and UK maps have always offered designers the option on whether to show Scotland in its accurate geographical position or in an inset box.

With a Maproom map you will usually find Shetland in its natural geographic position on the first artboard of the Illustrator file. Use this version if you want or need to. Then again, that’s a lot of empty sea top left that designers may find themselves itching to fill or crop out.

On the same Maproom base map file you will also often find a smaller artboard and easy select layer option for Shetland in an inset box. That’s going to be an easier scale and layout for many graphics projects. If working in Adobe Illustrator, you can turn on the Scotland inset with one click of a button. BUT THIS LAYOUT IS NO LONGER ALLOWED IF YOU ARE WORKING ON AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT FOR A PUBLIC BODY.

On the one hand, we understand the annoyance felt by the 23,000+ inhabitants of Shetland when their islands are completely left off maps of Britain. Orkney and Na h-Eileanan Siar (the Outer Hebrides) are often left off too. We’ve seen maps that even leave off Skye and Mull. In fact, the main aim of the islanders in bringing this mapping requirement is specifically to show the remoteness of Shetland, which poses great challenges in transportation, communications and other aspects of the local economy.

On the other hand, the omission of Shetland from many maps is not surprising, not only because of its far distant location and the visual problems this poses for designers, but also because any graphic designer drawing up a map of the UK from scratch will find it takes 50 times as long to draw all those Scottish islands and serrated mainland coastline as it takes to draw an outline of England. Oh, the temptation to draw a solid blob for Shetland rather than its four main islands, 12 other inhabited islands and more than 250 smaller islands! Save yourself days of effort and buy one of our Scotland, UK or British Isles maps.

Wording of the Bill regarding the mapping of Shetland

For customers who are required to abide by this directive, the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 is available in full here. Section 17 is the relevant part and the wording is as follows:

Shetland mapping requirement

(1) There is to be a Shetland mapping requirement.

(2) When publishing in any form a document that includes a map of Scotland, the Scottish Ministers, a local authority and any other Scottish public authority with mixed functions or no reserved functions must—

(a) comply with the Shetland mapping requirement, or

(b) where Ministers or, as the case may be, the authority consider that there are reasons not to comply, provide in such manner as they consider appropriate, information about those reasons.

(3) The Shetland mapping requirement is that, in any map of Scotland, the Shetland Islands must be displayed in a manner that accurately and proportionately represents their geographical location in relation to the rest of Scotland.

Maproom will be producing a special edition base map for official maps of Scotland with Shetland, plus secondary locator insets for all UK maps with a Shetland box option in due course. Please contact [email protected] if you require this urgently or if you have any requests for the mapping of Shetland and other Scottish islands.

It has been brought to our attention that Chinese authorities are now subjecting world maps to a process of verification to ensure they conform to China’s sovereignty claims. For example, the depiction of disputed territories such as Taiwan and islands in the South China Sea and gas fields in the East China Sea must conform to Beijing’s official view. Map projection, affecting the size of China in comparison with the rest of the world, is also under scrutiny.

These restrictions affect all products sold in China, including maps on merchandise and within books, and they also affect maps printed in China on products destined for markets outside of China. The latter are now being impounded at Chinese customs whilst the authorities examine their origination and design.

Consequences for products deemed to violate Chinese sovereignty may include fines and the order for companies to withdraw and destroy products.

Recent cases include Gap being forced to apologise for selling T-shirts in North America with a map of China omitting Tibet and Taiwan (15/5/18), and Muji, the Japanese retailer, being fined £23k+ for labelling indoor drying racks as ‘Made in Taiwan’ (25/5/18).

At present, the only Maproom map that includes China is our Vector World Map, and this is affected by the restrictions described above. Our editable base map includes Taiwan in a compound path with China, and our examples supplied with the download package include Taiwan in the same colour as China. Tibet is not delineated separately from the rest of China. However, our world map is at a small scale that does not include all the small islands in disputed territories. The projection of this world map is WGS84, whereas map service providers in China are required to use a slightly different projection created by China. It is also possible for customers purchasing this map to easily colour Taiwan and other islands differently to mainland China, which will likely lead to problems on products being printed or sold in China, and may even cause a problem for products printed and sold outside of China, as in the Gap case mentioned above.

Given the situation, we strongly advise customers to avoid using Chinese printers to print world map products, nor to attempt selling world map products in China, and to make themselves aware of potential issues when colouring Taiwan and other disputed territories.

We will update this information if we learn of further developments.

Further reading:

www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2146876/charts-why-chinese-publishers-dont-want-maps-their-books

www.businessinsider.com/r-new-chinese-map-gives-greater-play-to-south-china-sea-claims (includes China’s official map of China)

www.red24.com/members/intelligence/newsletters_security_briefings/south_china_sea_dispute (non-Chinese risk assessment company showing disputed territories in the South China Sea)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China