‘Lockdown has changed the way the nation gets outside’

The man at the helm of Ordnance Survey’s leisure mapping says the events of 2020 have created a new connection between Britons and their open spaces. And hopefully, it can only get better…

T’S INCREDIBLE HOW our appreciation for being outside flourished when our time outdoors was limited to an hour,” says Nick Giles.

“People discovered more about what was on their doorstep in the weeks between March and May than they might have known from years of living somewhere.”

Anecdotally, we can all testify to what Nick is talking about. That footpath through the woods that suddenly had more footfall than it had ever seen before. The lonesome riverbank, previously just known to dog-walkers and anglers, that became some sort of Victorian promenade in the early evening.

But Nick and his team at Ordnance Survey have the figures that show the same thing was happening across the country. The nation’s statutory mapping body saw an explosion in the usage of leisure mapping during lockdown and the subsequent easing period. And not just among existing users: much of the

ICOUNTRY WALKING uplift came from new customers seeking to explore the outdoors for the first time.

Nick has been the managing director of Ordnance Survey’s consumer operation for almost seven years – and like everyone else at OS, he had never seen the like of it.

“Obviously the situation was challenging for everyone. But as an organisation that exists to help people get outdoors, it was great to see this thirst for open spaces, in a pattern being repeated in every town and city across the country,” he says.

“People wanted to discover more; to vary that daily exercise and enrich it, and they were coming to us for the expertise that could help them do that.” A few headline stats since February:

in the use of the

in the use of the layer on OS Maps, which highlights accessible green space (parks, woodland, nature reserves, country parks etc) at an ultra-local level. in Custom Maps (where you create a paper map centred on your chosen location), with the most common title words being ‘home’, ‘lockdown’ and ‘neighbourhood’. in the use of the layer.

In addition to people planning local routes, OS also found that the app was being used in roughly equal numbers to plan routes in places that were out

This map shows the concentration of routes created on OS Maps during lockdown, with the less popular areas (represented by paler spots) annotated by name.