Guide · about 4 min
How to use this map
Everything else here assumes you already know your way around. This one is for if you do not: a quick tour of the controls, using real layers, before you go and explore on your own.
Switch on a layer
Nothing is shown until you choose it. This is the UK's annual mean temperature for 2024: every square kilometre of land, warmest in the south, coolest on the high ground. In the panel, that is one checkbox away.
Six maps: flick between them any time
Environment, Energy, Transport, Land & heritage, Curiosities, Europe: the tabs at the top of the panel switch between them, each with its own layers. Flick through them whenever you like. Nothing you have switched on is lost when you do.
Fade it, and read the legend
Every layer has an opacity slider, so you can fade it to see the basemap underneath, and a legend showing what the colours mean: the units, the year, and how far the data actually reaches.
Some layers move through time
A layer with a time slider carries a small control under the map. Drag it, or press play, to watch a place change year by year. Temperature here runs from 2000 to 2024.
Click anywhere to ask what is there
Switched to the river network here. Click any line on the map and a panel lists every active layer's value at that exact point (a reading, a name, whatever it knows) and says plainly when a layer simply does not reach that far.
Mix layers from every map
There are six maps (Environment, Energy, Transport, Land & heritage, Curiosities, Europe), but a layer stays on when you change map, so you can combine them freely. Power stations belong to Energy; 2024 temperature was switched on back under Environment, and it is still here too. Every layer that is on sits in the Active layers block at the top of the panel with its own switch, folded here to one line each so the switches sit side by side, ready to close.
The Europe map, beyond the UK
The Europe tab covers the whole continent, not only Britain: where people live, how built-up the land is, what covers it, how high it stands and which nature is protected. Switch a layer on and the map frames Europe for you; a second layer on top leaves the camera exactly where you put it. Every Europe layer comes from open data that can be reused commercially, and the list keeps growing.
Four looks for the same map
The basemap underneath everything can change too: Standard, Muted (good for busy layers), Dark, and Parchment for a gentle old-map feel. All four are the same real OpenStreetMap data, just styled differently.
Light or dark, and four languages
The two buttons in the top-right corner change how the whole app looks and reads. Light / Dark switches between the two modes, and the basemap follows, so a late-night session is easy on the eyes. EN / FR / ES / DE switches the whole site between English, French, Spanish and German: layer names, legends, stories and click readings. Your view and layers stay in the link, and the licence credits are always left in the sources’ own English.
Little pictures of famous places
Zoom in on a city and glossy little 3D pictures of famous places pop up: castles, cathedrals, bridges, mountains and more, across the UK, Europe and the wider world. Famous places: On / Off switches them, Filter places chooses the kinds, and clicking a picture opens a card about it. They are there to look at and carry no data of their own.
Stories: guided tours of the map
Stories are short guided tours that switch layers and move the map for you, like this one. They live at the top of the layer panel: one is suggested by title, and More stories opens the full list, which you can narrow by map. When a story ends, Choose another story brings you straight back to that list.
Search, share, and go
Type a place or postcode to jump straight there. The address bar always carries the exact view (layers, year, position), so any link you share opens to precisely what you were looking at. That is the whole toolkit.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Which control would you use to compare two different years of the same layer, and why?
- Why might a map say "no data here" instead of showing nothing at all?
Try it on the map: Keep the temperature layer on, then switch on a layer from a different map. Where do the two overlap, and does that surprise you?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.