UK Government Agencies

• Ordnance Survey
• Ordnance Survey Ireland
• Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland
• There is a website for all of the national mapping agencies of Britain and Ireland.
• United Kingdom Hydrographic Office homepage
• Multi-Agency Geographic Information for the Countryside. A one-stop shop for rural and countryside information
• British Geological Survey
• National Soil Resources Institute
• Office for National Statistics
• National Statistics geography webpages, being a guide to the main types of boundary used in the UK
• Intra-governmental Group on Geographic Information
• Countryside Information System

Ordnance Survey resources

• The Ordnance Survey is the national mapping agency for Britain.
• The Charles Close Society for the study of Ordnance Survey Maps has many useful publications and an information-packed newsletter.
• OS digital data in the UK Legal Deposit Libraries (an article by Chris Fleet for LIBER)
• Ordnance Survey list of triangulation points (released to the GPS Community)
• Summary lists of 1:50,000 (Landranger) maps and New Popular and Seventh Series maps have been compiled by Leslie Watson. He is also working on various 1:25,000 summary lists. His site also includes a cartobibliographical guide.

Dealers in OS mapping

• Advice on obtaining new and old OS mapping can be found in the document: Where to buy Ordnance Survey Maps by Anne Taylor of Cambridge University Library.
• Current: find your nearest stockist from the OS website

Second Hand, Reproduction and Digitised OS Maps

• Alan Godfrey Maps - Publisher of reduced reproductions of 1:2,500 county series maps with text describing local history, etc.
• David Archer - Holds extensive stocks of used maps mostly at six-inch and the smaller scales.
  address: The Pentre, Kerry, Newtown, Montgomeryshire SY16 4PD WALES
  tel: 01686 670382
  email: website@david-archer-maps.co.uk
• Cartographics - Second hand OS maps including 25", 6" and town plans. Non-OS used maps also stocked.
  address: 49 Grange Road, Biddulph, Stoke on Trent , ST8 7RY Tel: 01782 513449.
• Mapped Out - Sell original OS maps as well as reproductions of 1", 6", 25" and town plans dated 1830-1938.
  tel: 01600 869009
• Landmark - co-operated with OS to scan the County Series maps some of which are available free over the www**.
  ** It may also be possible to purchase the data on CD-ROM.
• Sitescope have scanned the pre-1950 1:10,560 OS maps in the collections of the Royal Geographical Society. These were available, on a county basis, on CD-ROM. Unfortunately since being taken over by Landmark this product is no longer available.

Reference sources

Gazetteers

• The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
• NIMA's GEONet Names Server - access the Board on Geographic Names gazetteers for countries around the world
• JewishGen's Shtetl Seeker - Search for towns in Central and Eastern Europe by placename or List all of the towns within a certain distance of a given latitude/longitude coordinates
• Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) - Contains entries for almost 2,000,000 geographic features in the USA. The site is maintained by the United States Board of Geographic Names and the US Geological Survey
• Place Name Servers on the Internet. An extensive set of links provided by Arizona State University
• SACO Excellent and comprehensive list of on-line gazetteers - made available through the Library of Congress program for Cooperative Cataloging
• Ordnance Survey Gazetteer. Search the OS 1:50,000 gazetteer and also view maps on-line. Includes section on the origin of place names.