Month: August 2007

Notes

City of London Orienteering Map

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 25 August 2007
1 Comment on City of London Orienteering Map

I’m going to have quite a lot of spare time over the next year (more on that shortly) and one of the projects I’m planning on doing is creating a City of London Orienteering Map, to ISSOM spec, for a possible future sprint orienteering race. There is already an orienteering map of the area, although it is simple (black & white, with roads features shown as lines.)

The City of London is an ideal area for a sprint orienteering race – a maze of historic winding roads, lots of interesting features, and best of all it is very quiet traffic-wise on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

This map shows the planned area I am going to survey. The light blue area is my initial target area (Smithfields, St Barts, St John Street, Barbican, The Square Mile north of Bank, Moorgate, Liverpool Street, Charterhouse, Tower 42 and the Gherkin.) A future extension might include some of light green area (the area between Bishopsgate and Commercial Street, the Tower of London, St Catherine’s Dock, Shad Thames, Millennium Bridge, Bankside, The Tate Modern, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Pool of London.)

The undoubted highlight will be the Barbican Complex, confusing at the best of times. I don’t think I’ve ever not got lost wandering around the Barbican area. The network of bridges above the busiest roads will be a feature too. Other interesting areas in the initial map will be Smithfields Meat Market, St Bart’s Hospital, and Guildhall.

I will probably be using Adobe Illustrator and the MapStudio plugin to create the map, as OCAD does not run well on Macs. Here’s a previous map I created with it – although this was done in a couple of hours based on a very short survey!

I’ve been to a few sprint races recently – Oxford, York and Kingussie to name but three. I’ll also be going to Warwick and Lincoln, and back to Oxford, soon.

ISSOM map samples from York, Scarborough, Sheffield and Wapping. The last is just east of the City of London.

And after the City of London there’s always Canary Wharf…

Orienteering Events Log

Back (Part 2)

Back from the Scottish Six Days, my second week’s orienteering this summer. Now at my parents’ house near Edinburgh, currently planning shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival over the next three days. To be precise, I’m lazing about while Alex and Nick are doing the planning…

Summary of the Scottish Six Days – great areas, especially Culbin (Thursday) and Anagach (today). Living in a huge Victorian mansion deep in a valley in the Highlands was rather special – the grand dining room with chandelier and paintings of various classical types was memorable – as were the sumptuous meals cooked by Tim and CJ. One particular meal finished at midnight. The midges were a bit of a menace, especially on the last day when they knew we were leaving. And it was a shame it rained on four of the six race days – though it wasn’t that bad when you were out on the forest. I got an opportunity to practice my race photography skills with my new SLR camera. Framing and focusing were difficult but I got a few good shots.

Notes

OO Cup Maps

I’ve put my maps from the recent OO Cup 5-Day event in Slovenia on my Routegadget install here. You can also view the maps individually (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Here’s my favourite part out of all the OO Cup areas this year. One word: Karstastic.

Leisure

OSM Update

The rendering for my first mapping for Open Street Map project has now appeared on the online service:

Compare with what it was like before:

My next OSM contributions will be some alpine roads in northern Slovenia. I got some good GPS traces for many of the roads I travelled on during last week’s holiday. Here’s a Google Earth view of one of the traces (in blue) – note I’ve tilted the viewpoint so you can see the shape of the hills and why the road had so many hairpins:

Notes

Back

Back from an awesome 5 days of orienteering at the OO Cup in northern Slovenia. Had some time to be a tourist too.

I will (of course!) write up each day in full when I get the time but, to sum up the week in a few phrases: Rustic chalet on remote farm, alpine shepherd houses, cows with cowbells, Lake Bled with fairy-tale island, negative karst terrain (the contours go down, not up!), a gorge and a cave, hairpin bends on mountain roads, hot and sunny to cold and wet in 24 hours, a walk in the mist, huge portions of food at amazing prices, some new Slovenian roads to be added to OSM in due course, a random biker bar, and some of the most enjoyable orienteering courses I’ve ever done.

Now back in London for a day or so, then up to Scotland to prepare for the Scottish 6 Days. I’ve just heard I”m going to be living in a remote Victorian Highland lodge for the week there – Glentromie Lodge, several miles down a winding country road deep into the Cairngorms. Possibilities for some Munro-ing, if I’m not too exhausted from the racing… or maybe just some Geographing and OSMing. Hoping for another memorable week.