Digitised versions of a set of 1:100,000 scale maps of aquifer vulnerability for England and Wales. The dataset identifies the vulnerability to pollution of major and minor aquifers as defined by the Environment Agency, utilising a combination of geological, hydrogeological and soils data. The maps are designed to be used by planners, developers, consultants and regulatory bodies to ensure that developments conform to the Policy and Practice of the Environment Agency for the protection of Groundwater. Please note that these maps are based on data from the late 1980's and early 1990's, more up-to-date digital data may now be available from the Environment Agency. Flat maps may be purchased from the BGS, some sheets are now out of print.

mixed sampling type - incorporates all previous detailed soil mapping augmented by a reconnaissance survey at 2-3/kme This dataset does not contain any soil parameter information. It can be associated with parameter information on the basis of soil type

A PDF map that shows the health areas in England and Wales as at April 2013. The map shows the health geographies (clinical commissioning group, NHS area teams, and NHS commissioning regions) that became operative in England as at April 2013 and the local health boards in Wales. (File Size - 4 MB)

This is a map of Worcester in a series of maps of England and Wales, shown at a 1:63,360 or one inch to one statute mile scale. This road map was created by the Great Britain Ordnance Survey.

This is a vector dataset representing land use in the 1960s across a selection of areas in England and Wales. The land use data is digitised from 110 published maps of the 1960s Second Land Utilisation Survey (2LUS) which was directed by Professor Alice Coleman. The published maps were digitised using a semi-automated supervised classification, followed by extensive post-processing to clean the vector dataset. The resulting dataset maps 11 land-use categories including “Arable”, “Broadleaved and mixed woodland”, “Coastal”, “Coniferous woodland”, “Grassland”, “Heath, moorland and rough land”, “Market gardening and orchards”, “Open space”, “Settlement”, “Unvegetated land”, “Water and Marsh”. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/03940756-afe9-428b-8c69-275e6b889251

This research project aimed to fill a major lacuna militating against the effective exploitation of many post-medieval to mid-Victorian historical sources collected by local administrative areas: the lack of information on the boundaries of those administrative areas, the so-called 'historic' or 'ancient' parishes of England and Wales. It is known that these districts came into being during the Middle Ages, that the map of these ecclesiastical parishes was essentially complete by the fifteenth century, that these ecclesiastical boundaries were adopted during the early modern period for secular and judicial purposes, and that boundaries remained essentially unchanged until a number of reforms from the mid-nineteenth century onwards reorganised the local administrative geography of the country. The project aimed to reconstruct those boundaries as they were before the post-nineteenth century changes.

A PDF map showing the registration districts in England and Wales as at December 2014. (File Size - 3 MB)

This is a map of Anglesey in a series of maps of England and Wales, shown at a 1:63,360 or one inch to one statute mile scale. This road map was created by the Great Britain Ordnance Survey.

An ARC GIS PRO shapefile mapping the turnpike roads in England and Wales for the 18th and early 19th century. The data includes details of the Turnpike Acts, years of operation, the quality of the road and the routes used by Mail coaches. The data forms the basis of the paper "Government, trusts, and the making of better roads in early nineteenth century England & Wales by Rosevear, Bogart & Shaw-Taylor.

The aims of the project were :
to ascertain how many enclosure, parochial assessment, drainage and sanitary maps survive in England and Wales;
to analyse their cartographic characteristics, including scale, date and mapmaker;
to analyse the way in which central and local government and their agencies used maps as instruments with which to implement policy relating to the ownership, use and taxation of land;
to analyse regional and temporal variations in the coverage of England and Wales by various types of map;
to obtain data on historic parish and township boundaries in England and Wales.

Two map files in ARC GIS PRO showing the main roads in England and Wales mapped by John Cary ca 1825

The Rural-Urban Classification is a Government Statistical Service product developed by the Office for National Statistics; the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and the Welsh Assembly Government.Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.Contains OS data © Crown copyright 2025Links below to FAQ, Methodology and User Guide FAQ https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/documents/ebfac455db0642afaa5052738ce5c32e/about Methodology https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/documents/833a35f2a1ec49d98466b679ae0a0646/about User Guide https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/documents/c8e8e6db38e04cb8937569d74bce277a/about

These maps are based on the Ordnance Survey quarter-inch to the mile series of maps, for England / Wales and Scotland. Most maps in this series show solid geology only, but there are a few drift maps within the New Series maps of England / Wales. There are three distinct series of quarter-inch maps: - Geological map of England and Wales. Quarter-inch series 1:253 440: Old Series (1889 - 1906). This is a set of hand-coloured maps which were published between 1889 and 1895 with later revisions. They were engraved onto copper. The series was issued as 15 sheets, where sheet 3 was an index to colours. - Geological map of England and Wales. Quarter-inch series 1:253 440: New Series (1906-1977). Following the popularity of the Old Series 'Quarter-inch' map, a New Series of colour-printed maps was issued. This was a long-lived series, with sheets still being published in the late 1970s. Maps were published between 1906–1977. The series was issued as 15 sheets, where sheet 3 was an index to colours. - Geological Survey of Scotland. Quarter-inch series 1:253 440 (1904-1977). These Scottish maps were published in parallel with the English / Welsh New Series, and was issued as 17 sheets. The quarter-inch mapping was superseded in the 1970s - 1980s by the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) Series geological maps of the UK and Continental Shelf. Geological maps represent a geologist's compiled interpretation of the geology of an area. A geologist will consider the data available at the time, including measurements and observations collected during field campaigns, as well as their knowledge of geological processes and the geological context to create a model of the geology of an area. This model is then fitted to a topographic basemap and drawn up at the appropriate scale, with generalization if necessary, to create a geological map, which is a representation of the geological model. Explanatory notes and vertical and horizontal cross sections may be published with the map. Geological maps may be created to show various aspects of the geology, or themes. The most common map themes held by BGS are solid (later referred to as bedrock) and drift (later referred to as superficial). These maps are hard-copy paper records stored in the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) and are delivered as digital scans through the BGS website.

A PDF map that shows the counties in England and Wales as at 31 December 1961. (File Size - 2.6 MB)

ArcGIS shapefile of 288 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census for England and Wales. As such this represents the counties of England and Wales as they were before the boundary changes caused by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 61) which led to the elimination of some of the detached portions of counties.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

Health geography hierarchy boundaries, December 2020, England and Wales.Boundaries used (BGC) for geographies in England and Wales are generalised (20m) and are clipped to the coastline for England and Wales.

In the middle of 2001 Roger Kain and Richard Oliver, from the University of Exeter, published a substantial work entitled Historic Parishes of England and Wales: Electronic Map - Gazetteer- Metadata. This was the final product of a project aimed at locating and mapping the boundaries of parish and sub-parish units of the mid-nineteenth century. The authors published the results in a series of electronic maps supplied on CD-ROM. Each one of these 115 maps contain a scanned 1”:1 mile OS New Popular Series map, overlain by the boundaries. A reference number can be found in each of the polygons that can then be used to look up information about that parish in gazetteer in an accompanying book.

A major limitation of this work is that although the boundaries are in digital form, they are divided into 115 tiles, none of which have any spatial co-ordinate information inherent in them. This means that although the maps are invaluable as a reference tool, they can not be used together within a GIS to select, analyse and present historic information.

We have therefore created a single digital map of the boundaries to provide a single, continuous coverage of polygons, each of which contain the information provided by Kain and Oliver in their accompanying book. This information includes the parish name, Ancient County, and a reference number that coincides with entries for that parish in the 1851 census report.

It is recommended that users also order disc 1 of study 4348; Historic Parishes of England and Wales : an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

These maps are based on the Ordnance Survey 'Old Series' One-Inch maps of England and Wales. They were the first 1:63 360 geological map series produced by the Geological Survey in England and Wales. Sheets were initially published as full sheets, and later as quarter sheets (NW, NE, SW, SE). Earlier maps are hand-coloured, later maps are colour-printed. The maps show both solid and drift geology. The OS 'Old Series' maps extended as far north as a line drawn between Preston and the Humber. To the north of this, the maps use the same sheetlines as the 1:63 360 New Series, and carry two sheet numbers, which refer to the Old Series (91-110) and New Series (1-73) numbering. These maps are common to both series. A sheet that covers the Isle of Man is also included in the series. Geological maps represent a geologist's compiled interpretation of the geology of an area. A geologist will consider the data available at the time, including measurements and observations collected during field campaigns, as well as their knowledge of geological processes and the geological context to create a model of the geology of an area. This model is then fitted to a topographic basemap and drawn up at the appropriate scale, with generalization if necessary, to create a geological map, which is a representation of the geological model. Explanatory notes and vertical and horizontal cross sections may be published with the map. Geological maps may be created to show various aspects of the geology, or themes. These maps are hard-copy paper records stored in the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) and are delivered as digital scans through the BGS website.

This dataset comprises 2 collections of maps. The facsmile collection contains all the marginalia information from the original map as well as the map itself, while the georectified collection contains just the map with an associated index for locating them. Each collection comprises approximately 101 000 monochrome images at 6-inch (1:10560) scale. Each image is supplied in .tiff format with appropriate ArcView and MapInfo world files, and shows the topography for all areas of England, Wales and Scotland as either quarter or, in some cases, full sheets. The images will cover the approximate epochs 1880's, 1900's, 1910's, 1920's and 1930's, but note that coverage is not countrywide for each epoch. The data was purchased by BGS from Sitescope, who obtained it from three sources - Royal Geographical Society, Trinity College Dublin and the Ordnance Survey. The data is for internal use by BGS staff on projects, and is available via a customised application created for the network GDI enabling users to search for and load the maps of their choice. The dataset will have many uses across all the geoscientific disciplines across which BGS operates, and should be viewed as a valuable addition to the BGS archive. There has been a considerable amount of work done during 2005, 2006 and 2007 to improve the accuracy of the OS Historic Map Collection. All maps should now be located to +- 50m or better. This is the best that can be achieved cost effectively. There are a number of reasons why the maps are inaccurate. Firstly, the original maps are paper and many are over 100 years old. They have not been stored in perfect condition. The paper has become distorted to varying degrees over time. The maps were therefore not accurate before scanning. Secondly, different generations of maps will have used different surveying methods and different spatial referencing systems. The same geographical object will not necessarily be in the same spatial location on subsequent editions. Thirdly, we are discussing maps, not plans. There will be cartographic generalisations which will affect the spatial representation and location of geographic objects. Finally, the georectification was not done in BGS but by the company from whom we purchased the maps. The company no longer exists. We do not know the methodology used for georectification.

LIDAR is an airborne terrain mapping system, which uses a laser to measure the distance between the aircraft and the ground. This technique results in the production of cost effective terrain maps with a height accuracy of 10 to 15cm. Typically with spot heights between 1 to 4 metres spatially on the land surface. CASI is used to provide information on the colour of the environment. It is designed to provide a flexible system which is easy to transport and straightforward to install and operate in small aircraft. It can be used for detailed studies of the spectral characteristics of ground or water targets, which are imaged instantaneously in a large number of spectral wavebands (up to 288), covering the visible and near infra-red regions of the spectrum, between 430 nm and 870 nm. Spatial resolution can be varied from one to ten metres, depending on the flying altitude and lens configuration. New LIDAR and CASI data sets are being gathered from parts of England and Wales all the time. For details on coverage and extent contact the National Centre.