complaint to the ordnance survey
I wish to make three complaints
1: as a person who has a degree in Graphic information design, turning the symbolic old symbol of christian churches a cross into the letters of PW (place of worship) how bloody non descript and weak an expression, this is an abomination, which person / pressure group organised this symbols swap to letters scenario ? the eye then has to differentiate this text from other text this isnt as efficient for the eye as differentiating a symbol from text which has a greater natural graphic seperation in the first place, this has no doubt be done to appease some ethnic groups somewhere, i find it denigrating and personally offensive that you have done this, not that im am in anyway part of any organised religion, as a graphic purist you are removing usefull information from the map, even if its a mosque (crescant symbol) … i want to know, if its a church (the old cross symbol) i want to know, small overly PC cowtowing no doubt idiot government approved of chivying denigrations such as these are continuously damaging my culture, it offends me your organisation gives way to this idiocy.
2: the “GetaMap” service (nice marketing slogan led era we live in today) well its a really great service, build your own walk with waypoints … stopoffs … point of interest …walking times … fantastic ………up to the point …… at which you need to use the information ? if i can’t get the route that ive constructed on the getamap website as anything other than static A4 printout for a £1, how really usefull is it to me in this technological age ? did you think about the environment and wasted paper you are creating with this one decision alone ? I guess you think your saving the environment compared to people buying full maps which are printed, I need it as digital information to go into a gps smartphone/iphone so I can live track myself on my route with all the points of interest and pubs as an itinerary, with perhaps a virtual walker on the same route travelling at my estimated speed so I can see whether im ahead or behind my schedule, then it would be a truly amazing service.
Do you fear … that you might be giving the people to much information from the information pile, they have paid you to collect in the first place ! whether as in your founding by charter of a warring king who taxed his people to pay for you, or through all the moneys that ultimately flowed from the people over the years to your organisation. I dont believe you should have no ways of generating revenue, I just believe that you should be making most of your money from commercial organisations, planning etc and not individual walkers.
oh there is memorymap digital maps … I hear you say ? well I’d only need 69 of those at £100.00 ie £6900 to get the whole of the UK at 1:25000 not even 1:10000, i would truly love to know what the vector based(ie not as images) dataset of britain at 1:10000 would be digital data size wise with all the information relevant to walkers, 32gb ? 2tb ? which ever way the idea that this could be squeezed into a handheld gps navigating device, seems possible to me.
3: The fact that in this day and age I still cannot get access to a whole or protions of a free 1:10000 digital footpath map for my own country is an embarassment for the OS, long may openstreetmap continue to grow and be contributed too by the ordinary public, so that one day we do have an organisation that is open and for the people in this digital age rather than being dependant on a public exploiting organisation like the OS, so that we the people can have our footpath knowledge for ourselves in a digital form, after all it was the ordinary people and the drovers and hard working sods over thousands of years of drudgery, who created the majority of the paths with their footfall in the firstplace. the footpaths are one of the small remaining symbols of some of the last public ownership and rights in this country that no matter how poor and disenfranchised you maybe in society, you can take advantage of on a nice walk, in a nation so consumerist, overmarketed, fractured, divided, outsourced, privatised and apportioned into the hands of the selfish few and private wealth international ownership brigade, it is a tragedy you dont make this footpath data freely available to people.
A British Native