What is all this stuff on the map?

If you look at an aerial photo of a place, it can be hard to make out what is what and how high different locations are. Maps remove information from a picture that you may not need to know, such as what colour the houses are and how many cars are parked outside, and then give you extra information that you need.

To make the information simpler, they replace most things with a symbol. All churches will have a church symbol although they may be a different size. All car parks have the same symbol even though they may take a different number of vehicles and you may have to pay.

Keeping it simple using symbols like this means that you can just glance at a map for something and immediately know where it is. For example, you can quickly scan your local area and immediately know where a telephone box is.

Ordnance Survey Symbols

Click here to see a list of commonly used symbols on Ordnance Survey maps. Note this is in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

If you do not have Acrobat on your computer, you can download it here.

Remember!

There is always a key on the map you are using explaining what all the symbols are, but it is much better to remember them so that you don’t have to keep unfolding it to find the key and look something up!