GB Overview Maps

GB Overview Maps offer free basemaps of Great Britain’s landscape, including features representing both the manmade and natural environment. This product includes two small-scale maps, one showing country boundaries, major cities and national parks, the other including cities, towns and the major road networks connecting them.

This product is updated annually

View documentationFree to use for everyone
Data access
  • Download
Data structure
  • Raster
Scale/resolution
1:5 000 000
Format
  • GeoTIFF
  • TIFF

What GB Overview Maps provides you with

Our simplest maps of the British Isles

The GB Overview Map is free to view, download and use for commercial, educational and personal purposes.

Clutter-free map

Your message will stand out as there is no clutter on this map. It's also great for hand-outs, desktop publishing and classroom use.

Zoom in from here

This is ideal as an initial map for your GIS. It highlights Britain while showing neighbouring countries of Europe.

Use cases

  • Suitable for visual communications, whether public-facing documents or policy briefings.
  • The uncluttered design serves as an initial layer for GIS, orientating users to a national context before layering in more detail.  
  • GB Overview Maps is available under the Open Government License and can be freely used in both commercial and personal projects.  

GB Overview Maps offer free basemaps of Great Britain’s landscape, including features representing both the manmade and natural environment. This product includes two small-scale maps, one showing country boundaries, major cities and national parks, the other including cities, towns and the major road networks connecting them.

This product is updated annually

View documentationFree to use for everyone
Data access
  • Download
Data structure
  • Raster
Scale/resolution
1:5 000 000
Format
  • GeoTIFF
  • TIFF

  • MiniScale

    Ordnance Survey's MiniScale is an open national backdrop map of Great Britain.

  • 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster

    1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster is an open dataset of the regional view of towns and villages, roads and places of interest.

  • OS Open Zoomstack

    Ordnance Survey's OS Open Zoomstack is an open vector basemap showing coverage of Great Britain from a national level, right down to street detail.