If you’re planning on visiting Pembrokeshire over the half-term holiday and want to explore the area and enjoy some great food – then we know the app for you! Real Food Wales is a new iPhone app from one of our GeoVation Challenge winners, and it can help you discover local, sustainable and delicious food along the Welsh Coast Path in Pembrokeshire.
Helen and Nicola Steer, sisters from South Wales, were one of five successful ventures in last year’s GeoVation Challenge, which asked entrepreneurs across Great Britain to use innovation and geography to come up with ideas to help connect communities and visitors along the new Welsh Coast Path.
The Real Food Wales team used their unique network of local knowledge to displaying a large selection of food businesses on an offline interactive map of Pembrokeshire. Real Food Wales maps over 150 of the best food businesses in Pembrokeshire, helping you access sustainable and delicious food. It’s the ideal app if you’re looking for a special meal at a restaurant, a bite to eat in a quirky café, the best sausage in town for your campfire or a food experience you’ll never forget.
The core feature of Real Food Wales is the interactive map, consisting of five zoom levels, which allow users to find the best places to eat out, buy food or have a foodie experience. The map of Pembrokeshire is stored onto your device, so you can access the information even when there is no mobile signal.
Continue reading 'Have a foodie experience with the Real Food Wales app'»
The GeoVation judging panel met this week and were delighted at the quality and scope of the ideas submitted to our GeoVation Challenge to look for ways that British business could improve their environmental performance using Ordnance Survey products or services in the solution.
The judging panel have now selected a short-list of 10 finalists who have been invited to develop their ideas further at the GeoVation Camp, held on the weekend of 21-23 June 2013 our Southampton head office.
The finalists are:
“Virtual” national transport fleet – an idea to create a connect-able, broker-free web of independent transport companies; breaking down the systemic big company/small company inefficiencies which exist.
Creating an Energy Democracy: The Wasted Energy Network – a platform for encouraging inter-business recycling, triggering waste-based economies and identifying areas of opportunity for sustainable waste management and energy generation systems.
RecycleLink – the idea is to bring waste producers and processors together using a centralised trading platform that will facilitate collaboration and reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.
Continue reading 'Environment challenge finalists invited to GeoVation Camp'»
When we saw an article in The Times about the 30 best towns in Great Britain, it sparked our imaginations at Explorer House and we wanted to see them laid out on a map. Would there be a hotspot in one area of the country?
The Times actually looked at a range of towns spread across great Britain that were chosen for their charm, history, housing, amenities and much more. Not only that, but they identified that these popular towns could already be spotted quite easily as their housing prices tended to be higher than the average for their region.
Over a series of days the newspaper ran a number of other top 30s featuring the coolest places to live, best places to retire and best places to have a second home, amongst others. We’ve taken four of those top 30s and put them on a map…have a look by clicking on the link below.
Continue reading 'Find the best places to live in Great Britain'»
The Keswick Mountain Festival is the largest event of its kind in the UK and we’re proud to be the official mapping partner of the Festival this year. Set in the heart of the Lake District, it inspires thousands of visitors to get into the great outdoors, try new activities and enjoy exciting experiences.
The event, which is being held at Crow Park in Keswick from Wednesday 15– Sunday 19 May, promises to be jam packed with leisure activities (cycling, climbing, hiking, swimming, kayaking, triathlons and more) inspirational speakers such as Chris Bonington, Graham Obree and John Beatty, live music, parties, swim clinics and map reading workshops. If you love the outdoors then this event is not to be missed.
Not only that, but if you book an activity at the Festival, you’ll receive a discount code giving you one month’s free access to OS getamap, our online route-planning and printing service. Over 140,000 routes have been drawn since its launch in March 2011. Subscribers benefit from free A4 Ordnance Survey mapping prints, extra route editing tools and full screen map view all for only £19.99 per annum.
We’ve featured a number of blog articles over the last few months showing historical map extracts and asking you to identify the modern landmark that now stands in the same spot. We all use maps in our daily lives to work out where we are and where we’re going, but it can also be really interesting to see how things used to be and compare that to the current landscape.
You might not have known that we sell a series of 477 historical maps, revised from the end of the 19th century and published in the early 1900s. The maps use the traditional 1 inch to 1 mile scale, showing contours, latitude and longitude, parish boundaries, railways, roads, waterways and woods.
You can see how your town has changed in the past 100 (or so) years or use the maps for the very popular ancestry research.
Continue reading 'Special offer on historical maps – half price for a limited time only!'»
Today’s walk is courtesy of one of our outdoors-loving colleagues, Alan Rolfe. You can see more of Alan’s walks (and bike rides) on his blog, Bikes and Boots.
Length of route:
Approx 8 miles, allow 2.5 hours.
Starting point:
SU 606182 (car parking near village hall).
Suitable for:
Walking
Maps:
OS Explorer Map (1:25 000) – 119 Meon Valley
Download our OS MapFinder app and plot or record the route
Use OS getamap to plot the route
From the car park, cross the A32 and walk along Hacketts lane, following the Wayfayers Way signs, heading W. Continue straight on to a path where the road turns R. Continue towards the hill ahead. At the foot of the hill, turn R and continue to follow the Wayfarers Way signs. After about 0.5km, as the path starts to descend on a more defined track, watch for a turning to the, almost hidden in the hedgerow. Take this path, leaving the Wayfarers Way, and continue climbing to cross a stile just before a minor road.
Continue across the road on to a very pleasant bridleway, heading generally W, then very soon almost S. Turn sharp R and descend heading N to a minor road. Follow the road straight ahead and a short while after the road swings L heading W, turn R to head N again to pass by a farm on the R and then a lovely house with a walled garden on the L. Continue on to enter a copse.
Continue straight across the B3035 across a field. At the time of the walk, the field had been very recently ploughed and there was no obvious path but the next marker can be seen straight ahead. Immediately after crossing the field at Bottom Copse, turn R to follow a bridleway heading east, then turn L at the farm to head N.
Continue reading 'Walk of the week: Droxford'»
Over the Bank Holiday weekend three surveyors from G&J Surveys were accompanied by Ordnance Survey’s Geodetic Analyst Mark Greaves to accurately measure the height of Tal y Fan, one of the smallest mountains in Wales.
Tal y Fan has a map height of 610 m (flush bracket height at triangulation pillar of 610.209 m) which is very close to the 609.6 m (2,000 ft) height that is generally accepted as defining mountain status in England and Wales. The weekend expedition was to check whether Tal y Fan should still hold mountain status or whether it should be reclassified as a hill.
Tal y Fan translates as The End Peak or Peak End. It is the most northerly of the 2,000 ft mountains in Wales and is situated at the end of the Carneddau mountain range. Part of this mountain range forms the greatest continuous height above 3,000ft of any land in Britain south of the Scottish border. Beyond Tal y Fan are the fertile pastures of the Conwy valley and then the sea. The history in the immediate vicinity of Tal y Fan dates back to prehistoric times as two monoliths still stand at the gateway to Bwlch y Ddeufaen (Pass of the Two Stones), this is the old pass through the mountains that was still in use during Roman times.
The aim of the survey was to survey the very highest point of Tal y Fan and gather a minimum of two hours of summit data. After an afternoon of capturing height data the team returned to the Valley where it was down to Ordnance Survey’s Mark Greaves to process the data.
After double checking the results it was then the responsibility of BBC Breakfast to reveal the results live on Monday morning. At 6.50 am live on BBC One it was confirmed that Tal y Fan measured 609.98 m (2,001 ft), some 38 cm (1 ft 3 in) above that needed to qualify for mountain status.
Read the BBC article too: ow.ly/kMc64
There’s a twist to our usual ‘just for fun’ map extract quiz today as we celebrate the 2012-13 Premier League Champions. We have a 2012-13 season Manchester United football shirt personalised with O’Survey on the back to give away.
Wondering why we have an O’Survey Manchester United shirt? The club has used one of our OS OpenData products, OS VectorMap District on their website. They have released a video guide to Manchester and changed the colour of the mapping to match their kit colours. You can see the guide on their website if you are a member, or check the image below if not. As a thank you for using our data, they personalised a shirt for us – and we’d like to give it away to a football and mapping fan!
OS VectorMap District being used on the Manchester United website
All you need to do is take a look at the map extracts below, featuring our OS MasterMap products, and tell us:
- the eight football clubs; and
- the link between them.
Continue reading 'Win an O’Survey football shirt in our football grounds quiz'»
Did you know that we’re running an undergraduate programme for paid summer internships at Ordnance Survey? There’s a whole range of posts available from HR to Technology and working with geospatial data and products to developing our online mapping service, OS getamap.
If you didn’t already know about us, at Ordnance Survey we’re constantly looking at our data and how we collect and deliver it to keep it commercially viable in a continually evolving world. We’ve got the expertise and the technology, and we need the fresh thinking, imagination and talent to see us even further into the future.
Interested in an internship? Find out more about us on Facebook...
We’re looking for undergraduates who are happy to be thrown in at the deep end and work alongside us to find genuine business solutions. It’s a great opportunity to gain a real-life view of what a career at Ordnance Survey would be like while building your own skills and confidence in the workplace.
The roles are open to undergraduates in their first, second or penultimate year of study and applications need to be in by 17 May 2013. All internship roles are paid and will be available for 6-8 weeks over the summer with flexible start dates.
Continue reading 'We’re recruiting for summer internships'»
Since its launch in January our outdoor navigation app, OS MapFinder, has now reached over 100,000 downloads and over 600,000 sessions. We’re thrilled with the success of the app, available now on the App Store, designed to map the way for walkers, runners and cyclists across Great Britain.
Our free-to-download iOS app contains overview mapping of the whole country alongside a sample tile of our detailed walking and cycling maps. You can then purchase more 1:25 000 and 1:50 000 in 100 km2 tiles (the same scales as our popular OS Landranger and OS Explorer paper maps) of the areas you want.
The four most popular tiles downloaded so far are:
| 1 Edge of Peak District |
| 2 South Downs/Hailsham |
| 3 Peak District |
| 4 Lake District |
Very popular areas for enjoying the British countryside!
Continue reading 'Our OS MapFinder app hits 100,000 downloads'»
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