UK Government Agencies

• Ordnance Survey (OS)
• Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi)
• Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI)
• United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO)
• Multi-Agency Geographic Information for the Countryside (MAGIC) - A one-stop shop for rural and countryside information
• British Geological Survey (BGS)
• National Soil Resources Institute
• Office for National Statistics and UK National Statistics
• Office for National Statistics guide to boundaries and other geography products
• Countryside Information System (CIS) 

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 and website
• 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 MS Word document: Where to buy Ordnance Survey Maps by Anne Taylor of Cambridge University Library
• Current: find your nearest OS walk-in retail outlet
• Or try OS OpenData

Second Hand, Reproduction and Digitised OS Maps

• Alan Godfrey Maps - Publisher of reduced reproductions of OS maps, mainly 1:2,500 county series maps, with text describing local history, etc
• David Archer Maps - Holds extensive stocks of used maps mostly at six-inch and the smaller scales 
• Cartographics - Second hand OS maps including 25", 6" and town plans. Non-OS used maps also stocked
• Landmark - Co-operated with OS to scan the County Series maps some of which are available free over the www at old-maps.co.uk**.
  ** 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 and the mapping was available, on a county basis, on CD-ROM. The data is now avaiable via Landmark (see above)

Reference sources

Gazetteers

• The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
• 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. (Also lots of other useful links)
• SACO Excellent and comprehensive list of on-line gazetteers - Made available through the Library of Congress pogram 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

Page last updated: 1/3/13