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Feature: Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey®
The customised Ordnance Survey® map of London is specially designed to support RIBA’s Architecture Week 2007, a celebration of all that’s best with our contemporary built environment.
. We want the map to reinforce the importance of architecture, urban regeneration and the huge amount of green space in London that’s there to enjoy and so vital to protect. Just as architecture has a huge impact on society, so does the underlying geographic information that helps us decide where and what to build for sustainable living. Ordnance Survey has been providing that information for more than 200 years.
As Great Britain’s national mapping agency, our aim is to provide the definitive geographic context for the places we all live and work in. Today, it’s not just about paper maps or even satellite navigation – all kinds of digital geographic information is relied on by architects, designers and urban planners. The overlays on this map show areas of regeneration, key projects and green spaces around London on different kinds of mapping at a variety of scales. Our portfolio includes topographic, height, road network, spatial address and aerial photography products. Property professionals choose data from the range to help with feasibility studies, environmental investigations, scenario modelling and presenting design plans. To collect and maintain our information, each of our 300 field surveyors covers thousands of miles a year recording the changing face of London and the whole country. Equipped with GPS kits and other precision measuring devices, they make an average of 5 000 changes everyday to our central geographic database. We also have a national infrastructure of GPS base stations, which improve the accuracy of raw satellite-based positioning to centimetre level anywhere in the country. As part of our ongoing investment in the infrastructure, we are putting new stations in the Thames Gateway and London Olympic region to support the massive redevelopment expected there in the next 5 to 10 years. We supply the architectural community with our information in different ways. There are hundreds of Ordnance Survey Licensed Partners offering products, services and solutions based on our data, many of them tailored to the land and property market. We also have a dedicated network of retailers known as Ordnance Survey Mapping and Data Centres, which are especially popular with architects, planners and construction companies. Each retailer has a direct computer link to our database so they can supply customers with the very latest mapping on demand. The network includes a desktop mapping service for customers preferring to choose maps and data from their own premises. You don’t need to be an architect or property professional to use the services of the network: if you need maps or data for your own building or green space you can order exactly what you need, whether you’re in London or anywhere else in the country.
For more information on Ordnance Survey visit
www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk