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…
One reply on “City of London Orienteering Map”
Excellent idea Ollie – I work in London (just to the right of your map extract just off Commercial Road.) I’ve used the TFL route planner tool to create a basic street map that I’ve been using for some Street Orienteering training for the last few months. It definetly shows the potential for a Venice-type map and ‘Classic’ races, or a more sprint style map around Barbican, Temple, etc.
Unfortunatley I haven’t got much spare time to help with the mapping/field survey, but am happy to test run anything you come up with.
Good luck!
Anthony Squire