Britain’s most popular routes
When we started to analyse the 500,000 plus routes in our OS Maps service, it was no surprise to us that the Lake District would top the table as the nation’s favourite place to #GetOutside. But we were also interested in the urban walks that inspire exploration. Our Cartographic Designer, Charley Glynn, extracted all of the public route information and created a series of stunning data visualisations to showcase town and city route favourites.
The ten cities and towns in Britain with the most routes in OS Maps
Once again, the Lake District topped the league table with Keswick and Ambleside, clearly ahead of nearest rivals Guildford and the City of Westminster. You can see the full list below.
The 500,000 plus routes were illustrated in a series of beautiful data visualisations by Charley, who found it amazing that the people who created routes for their outdoors adventures had logged almost every bit of British coastline. It neatly frames the rest of the data and gives the illusion you are looking at a map of Great Britain. The darker, thicker areas illustrate the higher concentration of routes and reveal popularity.
The Yorkshire city of Leeds made it into the top ten, and with Roundhay Park in the area, it’s easy to see why it’s a popular area to get outside. One of the biggest city parks in Europe, it has over 700 acres of parkland, lakes, woodland and award-winning gardens.
OS Maps routes visualised for Leeds
Top 10 cities and towns and number of routes
Keswick – 1746
Ambleside – 1619
Guildford – 1146
City of Westminster – 1129
Richmond upon Thames – 1099
Winchester – 1089
Leeds – 1072
Sheffield – 1043
Bath – 1041
Bakewell – 1006
You can see all of these areas visualised in our Flickr gallery.
Outside the top ten
We couldn’t resist taking a look at some other popular areas that didn’t make it into the top ten. London is particularly clearly defined in Charley’s data visualisation, especially along the River Thames and on the bridges crossing it.
Closer to home for us, the Isle of Wight and Southampton Water were also perfectly mapped by the routes plotted in OS Maps. You can see where people have recorded routes whilst zipping about the Solent – both on popular ferry routes and pleasure boats judging by the lines created.
See higher resolution versions of the visualisations on our Flickr gallery.
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Just wondering what data was used to analyse the route’s popularity. Was twitter used? Or were polylines harvested from Google?
Cheers,
Doug
Hi Doug
All of the data is from our 500,000 plus publicly created routes in our OS Maps service. The darker, thicker areas in the data visualisations illustrate the higher concentration of routes and reveal popularity. You can also see our news release: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2016/britains-most-trodden-paths.html
Thanks, Gemma
Hello Gemma
I would really be interested in seeing what routes are walked around the Brecklands area of Norfolk and Suffolk. Is there any way I can download, or examine the map in more detail away from the more popular areas?
Fantastic project by the way
Peter
Hi Peter
Great to hear that you like the project. We created the visualisations based on all of the routes contained within our OS Maps service. We haven’t created detailed visualisations for every area of the country, just a small selection to show the areas most populated with routes, so we don’t have one for Brecklands set up. I can pass the feedback along to the team, but at this time, we don’t have any plans to release further visualisations or to make the route data downloadable. We will, of course, shout loud and clear if that changes.
Thanks, Gemma
Hi Gemma,
These look really beautiful. Are you planning to sell them as posters at all, and if so where can I find them?
Thanks,
Sally
Hi Sally
Thank you, lovely to hear. We haven’t got any plans to sell them at the moment. They are all available on our Flickr page and can be downloaded from there though: https://www.flickr.com/photos/osmapping/albums/72157670060433252
The version showing the whole of GB is designed to be downloaded as A3 size, the others would be smaller.
Many thanks
Gemma
I wish I could study this with an http://www.openrailwaymap.org/ as an overlay, to see railtrails, both official and unofficial, and identify walks adjacent to active railways.
It would be especially useful if OS could do a tileset that could be used with Android/iOS apps such as AlpineQuest, Gaia, Osmand, ViewRanger, etc. With at least one of those offering the NLS historical OS tilesets, and several offering current OS or comparable mapping, some very interesting studies could be done.
What a shame! All this work and most people can’t make use of it because there’s no way of drilling down on the detailed information.
Hi ,
We run a newspaper on Dartmoor called The Moorlander and we’d love to run an article on this, are we allowed to use the images?
Kind Regards
Ross Tibbles – Deputy Editor
Hi Ross
Yes, please do use them, we’re more than happy. The best place to download them is our Flickr page here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/osmapping/albums/72157670060433252
Just let us know if you have any other questions.
Thanks, Gemma
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Great work but agree with comments above- would make fantastic posters but mostly would like to use in practice especially to use least walked oath as per Telegraph feature
I agree these all look amazing and would make fantastic wall art. I am hoping the positive feedback might make this happen.
Brilliant project!
I’m not seeing a usable map with these as overlay. Bizarre, from the OS of all people.
Also, what about normalizing the routes’ popularity by the prevailing local population density?
Hi Tim
Our data visualisations purely illustrate the routes that people have plotted and recorded across the country using our OS Maps service. There was no intention for them to be usable maps. We were fascinated at how people’s walking and cycling routes so clearly defined the outline of Britain, and how the National Parks are such hotspots for activity.
I will pass your feedback along to the team who created the visualisations.
Many thanks
Gemma