Guided stories
Start with a question.
Each story walks the map through a few steps, changing layers, years and places as it goes. Every figure is worked out from the open data behind the map.
Land & heritage map
From empire to Commonwealth
At its peak it covered about a quarter of the world's land, built on conquest, slavery and extraction. Today 56 countries are in a voluntary club, and five of them were never British colonies.
Where can I roam? Access, parks and heritage
Open access land, National Trust land, country parks and thousands of protected historic sites.
How much of Britain is protected heritage?
486,470 listed buildings, thousands of scheduled monuments and more, across four nations that each count them differently.
Three ways to manage the land you can walk across
England's National Trails run 4,111 km; Wales built one continuous coastal path in a single push.
Conservation areas: a beta list against a settled one
Scotland's largest conservation area is over 4,000 times the size of its smallest.
Transport map
How Britain's trade has changed since 1997
China's trade with the UK grew 24-fold since 1997: from a minor partner to Britain's biggest deficit.
Who comes here, and where do Britons go?
Britons made 18.2 million visits to Spain in 2024. Spain sent 2.6 million to Britain.
Who lives without a car?
In London 42% of households have no car or van. Across England and Wales it is 23%.
Who worked from home during lockdown?
On Census day in 2021, 42% of working Londoners mainly worked from home. In Boston it was 11%.
Britain's roads: busy, quiet and dangerous
Traffic on every motorway and A road since 2000, the year the lockdown emptied them, and where people are hurt and killed.
Does living near a station mean living near jobs?
318 English and Welsh councils, their walk to the nearest station and their job density, compared. The two barely move together.
How far can you ride away from traffic?
19,797 km of signed cycle route. The traffic-free part comes in 5,268 pieces, half of them shorter than 0.4 km.
Curiosities map
Where the Vikings named their villages
Place names are a fossil record: Old Norse, Old English, Roman and Celtic names sort themselves across the map.
Who rents privately?
About one household in five in England and Wales rents from a private landlord. In the most deprived tenth of English neighbourhoods it is 24%.
Homes with a bedroom too few
The census counts how many bedrooms a household needs and how many it has. In the most deprived tenth of English neighbourhoods, 8.5% come up short.
Who says their health is bad
The census asked everyone to rate their own health. 5.2% of England and Wales answered bad or very bad, and the map of those answers is one of the sharpest pictures of inequality the census gives.
Can you afford to live there? Homes, pay and years of wages
House prices since 2005, what people earn, and how many years of pay a home costs.
How far is the silliest place from a train?
Slaggyford sits just 159 metres from its own railway station. Muckle Flugga is 292.7 km from the nearest one.
Does cold weather mean fuel poverty?
England's 296 councils, their 2024 temperature and their fuel poverty rate, side by side. The answer is not the simple one you might expect.
Who has the dirtiest air?
England’s most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods has 31% more nitrogen dioxide in its air than the least deprived tenth.
Environment map
How much warmer has the UK got, and what comes next?
Twenty-five years of measured temperature, then climate-model projections out to the 2070s.
The wettest, sunniest, coldest: Britain's weather extremes in 2024
The most extreme 1 km squares of 2024, each named after the nearest hill or village.
England's storm overflows: how often they spill, and what that means for the beaches
Five years of spill counts for 14,303 sewage overflows across England, and what they say about the bathing water each one is linked to. A real link, but a messy one.
The air we breathe: 14 years of cleaner London
Modelled background air pollution, 2010 to 2024, against the World Health Organization's guidelines.
What is under your feet?
Britain's bedrock by age, the cracks and dykes that cut it, and the loose ground on top.
How healthy are England's rivers?
The Environment Agency's 2022 classification of 3,928 river, canal and transfer water bodies.
Where could England flood?
A tenth of England’s land lies in its highest flood zone. In Boston, 94% of the land is in a flood zone.
Do the most deprived neighbourhoods flood most?
In England’s most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods 5.7% lie mostly in Flood Zone 3. In the least deprived tenth it is 1.9%.
Do crowded places breathe worse air?
Population density against modelled nitrogen dioxide, council by council across the UK: the two move together more closely than almost anything else on this site.
How much of Britain is protected for its nature and scenery?
National Parks, National Landscapes, scenic areas, reserves and ancient woods: four nations, four sets of rules, one map.
How much of England is wild habitat?
Natural England maps about 16% of England’s land as priority habitat. Woodland is the largest group, with 5.5% of the whole country.
Energy map
Where does Britain's electricity come from?
Gas, nuclear, wind and the end of coal on a map of every larger power station, and how much of that capacity is really being generated.
Charging ahead? Where public electric-car chargers are
Public EV chargers per person and in total, council by council, on 1 July 2026.
The homes with no central heating
Only 1.5% of homes in England and Wales have no central heating at all, which makes the places well above that worth a look: the Isles of Scilly, and central London.
Wind farms, solar farms and where they sit
The windiest places, the wind farms in them, and why solar clusters in the south.
Mix two maps, find something new
23 power stations inside a National Park, 7.8% of renewable energy sites inside the Green Belt: questions no single map answers alone.
Where Britain's renewable power really sits
North Yorkshire alone has 3,116 MW of installed renewable capacity, the most of any council in the UK.
Scotland's offshore wind: what's turning, and what's coming
Scotland has leased nine times as much offshore wind capacity as is generating today.
Europe map
Where Europe is built up, and where it is still wild
Five satellite views of one continent: people, buildings, their age, what covers the ground and the places set aside for nature.
Why Europe lives low
Europe’s mountains make the postcards, but almost nobody lives on them: six views of people and the height of the land.
Where Europe grew, and where it emptied
Thirty years of satellite and census grids: who gained people, who lost them, and why the buildings grew faster than both.
Europe after dark
Thirty years of night-time light from space: the east switching on, two generations of satellite, and a warning about what a change between two years can mean.
Forests felled, burned and replanted
Twenty-four years of tree loss seen from space: why a fifth of Sweden and Finland counts as lost, and what the fires of Portugal and Greece look like.
Lakes, rivers and water that comes and goes
From Finland’s thousands of lakes to a reservoir that filled in Portugal and one that emptied in Ukraine: what thirty-five years of satellite pictures show about water on the land.
Where Europe’s electricity is made
France’s nuclear fleet, Poland’s coal, Norway’s hydro: the big dots of the 2021 power plant map, and the wind and solar that the map misses.
Electricity doesn’t stop at the border
Luxembourg imports the equivalent of almost three-quarters of what it uses; Sweden exports more than a quarter of what it makes. A continent-wide grid moves the difference.
How has Europe’s air changed since 2010?
Weighted by where people live, Europe’s nitrogen dioxide fell by 45% between 2010 and 2024. Fine particles fell by 40%, yet 96.4% of people still live above the WHO guideline.