Points of Great Interest
Posted by Mark Moxon on 22 April 2008
Now that I’ve designed my route, I’ve been slowly adding points of interest to each section, and I have to say I’m really enjoying myself. I originally designed my route to go via as many interesting spots as I could find, weaving around through suburban parks, along urban rivers, past the sites of historical events and via as many famous landmarks as I could cram into a sensible day’s walk; but it’s only now that I’m annotating my maps that I’m getting properly excited, because it’s gradually dawning on me just how interesting this walk is going to be. In London, there are interesting stories every few yards, just one reason why urban walking is refreshingly different from walking in the countryside.
Part of the reason I’m discovering so much about London is Wikimapia. This wiki-powered site shows a Google map of the world that visitors can mark up with information that shows what the buildings in the map actually are. It’s particularly good in central London, where you can simply hover your mouse over the satellite images to find out the names of buildings, rivers, pubs a whole lot more. Here’s me discovering the spot where the last person was killed in England for being a witch, just to the west of the Inns of Court in Temple:
The database is, of course, far from complete, but there is a huge amount of information in there already, and without it I wouldn’t have had a clue that my route takes me past the sites of three Jack the Ripper murders, the place where the first V2 rocket hit London, and the London residences of Elton John and the late Freddie Mercury (to name just a few interesting spots).
Also invaluable has been Multimap, whose maps contain more placenames than any others that I’ve found. Multimap is particularly good on the names of parks and recreational grounds, and it’s much better than Google at showing footpaths (though its satellite shots are pretty poor, so Google still wins there). Add in the maps and guidebooks I bought at the start of this project, and I’ve got access to a massive amount of information about where I’m walking.
The trick now is to get it into the website in time for June. I’ve managed to add some 600 points of interest to the Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City, District and Circle lines, and I’ll publish these on site once I’ve polished up the results. Now I just need to add points to the rest of the lines, and that will be all the planning done. I’ll need a nice long walk after all this mouse clicking, I can tell you…
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