The current cold snap is causing havoc with the UK orienteering fixtures list, with icy roads making getting to many areas impossible. The list makes for some grim reading:

SLOW’s own street orienteering event on Tuesday is also subject to an inspection on Sunday. Unfortunately, the forecast does not suggest things are going to be getting warmer any time soon.

Time for some armchair orienteering or maybe a Google Streetview Street-O race?

Once again I was up in the Scottish Highlands with JOK. We were staying in Onich, on the Glen Coe to Fort William road, but most of our mountaineering was in Glen Coe itself, apart from one day in Ardgour. It was generally cold but clear, with a decent amount of snow on the hills, and a biting northerly wind at times, so days were generally quite short but very scenic.

Here’s the GPS “shapes” of my walks over the six days – these are created by OSM automatically when uploading the GPX files.

Attackpoint log. Photos to follow…

Here’s a video of the Brighton Street Race that I ran in last Tuesday evening. It was one of SO’s regular Tuesday night training events, with a difference – a one-hour, mass-start score event but with a compulsory 2.8km sprint section in “The Lanes”, with SI punching, which was to be completed in order. This section included a run around the outside of the Royal Pavilion.

The compulsory section could be done at any time in the hour, with the rest of the time getting as many of the score controls (which were the usual writing down answers to clues) as possible. I got almost all of these, including one in the bandstand on the shorefront.

I’m easy to spot as I’m the only one wearing shorts (it was about 2°C). However, the fast pace of the sprint section, and the ever-steepening climb up to the station early on the race, warmed me up just fine.

Excited to hear that there might be a full-scale city race in Brighton in the future. The big slope the city is built on has the potential to make it quite an interesting one!

With the OpenStreetMap spatial dataset of the world, and the excellent map rendering toolkit Mapnik, it’s quite straightforward to make theme-based maps, such as OpenCycleMap, OpenPisteMap, OpenHikingMap and OpenWhitewaterMap.

All very well, but what about orienteering maps? So, here is OpenOrienteeringMap. For the moment, it just covers the UK, but there’s no particular reason why this couldn’t be extended to cover the world (except that the postcode-finder only works in the UK). [Update - it now covers almost the whole world!]

The map is created on-the-fly, using a process developed by the OSM community that I’ve built on for my day job at UCL. The map is created on a quite fast computer, but because it is created on-demand for areas people haven’t visited before, it may run slow if a few people are looking at it at once – and you’ll need a fast internet connection as the map is delivered as PNGs.

There are two styles – Street-O and Pseud-O.

Street-O

This attempts to recreate the “minimalistic” feel of street-O maps, as used for informal street events in London by the central clubs SLOW and LOK, and in other areas around the UK. Only roads, tracks, paths, rivers/lakes and railways are shown, the maps are high-contrast (black on white) and have little colour. The few colours that are on the map – for major roads and water features – are the “official” ISOM standard colours for these features.

OpenStreetMap data has been used for one street-O before – my Bow race in September, although here the data was pulled into Quantum GIS and a vector-based PDF was produced, allowing maps to be printed at high resolution.

Pseud-O

This is a less standard but richer map. It uses many more features in the OSM data, where they correspond to regular orienteering features. OSM data, for ~99.999% of areas, is not detailed enough to correspond to that on an ISOM map, but it might be sufficient for basic urban orienteering events in a few places, or the odd trail challenge. As the OpenStreetMap dataset continues to be added to and enhanced by its contributors, so the orienteering map will increase in complexity and accuracy. Again, the colours are as officially defined in ISOM. For now, it’s fun to look at the whole of the UK with the ISOM look-and-feel, but let’s not run any serious events with the map! (More on ISOM orienteering maps and OSM.)

The postcode finder uses the c. 70000 postcodes supplied by NPEMap (with contributions from FreeThePostCode and the postbox locator project) so should get you to within a mile or two of where you want to be, in urban areas.

Explore the map and let me know about any big problems with the cartography or functionality via the comments here. I’m not interested in missing data complaints for an area though – OSM is a project produced by the efforts of volunteers, so if your area is blank, it’s because there isn’t an interested local. So go and map the area yourself, and add it to OpenStreetMap so the whole world benefits (and let me know so I pull in the updated dataset!)

More information about how the map is made is here.

Top: Good to see the efforts of the Milton Keynes mapping party I organised in May make it to an orienteering map. Upper Middle: Edinburgh’s Old Town. Lower Middle: Shotover Wood, near Oxford. Bottom: Great detail in Putney, thanks to an enthusiastic local contributor in the area.

I’ve just set up the ability to embed videos in the blogs running off my department’s blog server, so here’s a couple of videos to test it works.

Vimeo example video:

Interland 2009 from Ultimate Orienteering on Vimeo.

Youtube example video:

As mentioned previously, I’m hoping there’s going to be some orienteering races put on in London’s East End over the next few years – I might organise a few. The first is likely to be a street race in April.

One interesting question though – where exactly is the East End? How big is it, how far east (and west, north and south) does it extend? Wikipedia has an article on it but simply says it’s east of the City of London and north of the River Thames.

Here’s where I think it is:

What about Eastenders?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy has a suprisingly succinct definition:

Here’s an old map showing from where you can hear the Bow Bells (from St Mary-Le-Bow in the City, not in Bow) ringing, presumably assuming a prevailing south-westerly wind carrying the sound north-eastwards from the City. Why is this interesting? Well, the traditional definition of a Cockney (i.e a Eastender) is someone who was born within earshot of the bells.

Modern traffic noise, even at night, means that the bells would no longer be audible at such a range.

My route from last night’s Street-O race in South Hampstead.

Here’s the event’s I’m planning on running in over the next couple of months. Assuming the weather’s nice, of course. At this time of year, though, I tend to just stay in bed if it’s pouring with rain…

• 21 November – Sheffield Chasing Sprint – forecast not looking great, but should be a great set of two back-to-back races. Final race in the Nopesport Urban League series.
• 22 November – Epping Forest East – one of my favourite areas, and cycling distance from home.
• 28 November – Finsbury parkrun
• 29 November – OK Nuts Trophy – my club’s biggest terrain event of the year.
• 3 December – Primrose Hill Street-O
• 5 December – Finsbury parkrun
• 6 December – HAVOC Langdon Hills local
• 8 December – Putney Street-O
• 12 December – Finsbury parkrun, or HH Verulamium local
• 13 December – Cannock Chase national or QECP regional
• 19 December – Finsbury parkrun
• 25/26 December – Edinburgh parkrun?
• 27 December – ELO Festive Frolic?
• 1 January – JOK training event in the Highlands?
• 9 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 10 January – Hemsted local
• 12 January – Kingston Street-O
• 16 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 17 January – Sheepleas & Effingham regional
• 23 January – Finsbury parkrun
• 24 January – CSC Qualifiers, Leith Hill?
• 30 January – Edinburgh City Race
• 31 January – JOK Chasing Sprint, Edinburgh

Orienteering is not an Olympic sport, it is however a grassroots activity which just happens to have a number of venues (some existing, some potential) close to the site of the 2012 London Olympics. As such, the sport of orienteering could benefit from any increase in interest in sports in this part of east London, caused by the approaching Games.

The above map (basemap by Cloudmade, based on OpenStreetMap data) shows existing and possible venues for orienteering events around the Olympic Park site which is shaded in red:

1. Hackney Marshes and Mabley Green. A very large (400 acre) venue, although not particularly interesting – essentially football pitches as far as the eye can see. However, there is enough of interest for a local event, particularly if the two parks on the west side of the Lee Navigation are included. A hidden gem just in the south part is Wick Woodland, a proper, dense wood with a maze of paths. Sadly, the Waterworks Nature Reserve, just to the north of the marked area, is likely to be out-of-bounds. I believe LOK have an old black-and-white map of the main part of the marshes, from the eighties. The East Marsh is due to be tarmacked over and turned into a giant car park for the Games themselves.
2. Victoria Park is another large (200 acre) green area, LOK mapped it many years ago and it was used quite regularly for events, up to around 10 years ago. I understand they are about to re-map it and it will hopefully be used for an event next summer.
3. Bow – this area was first used for a Street-O race in September – event results.
4. Queen Mary and Mile End Park was used for a SLOW park race in 2008. The campus area is small but allows for exciting sprint racing, the park is also narrow but has some interesting features. A new bridge across the Regent’s Canal has just opened, which will allow the map to be expanded for a similar race in the future.
5. The Isle of Dogs including Canary Wharf and Limehouse – this is an aspiration, no orienteering map exists yet, and organising a race here would be a huge logistical challenge, but this would make a super area for a city race, possibly in 2011 or 2012.
6. Greenwich Park – DFOK have created an orienteering map of this hilly 180 acre royal park, which is also a venue for the 2012 Olympics. It was used for an event in March, and there will be another one in April 2010.
7. Lea River Park – at the moment, the useable area – Three Mills Green and the House Mill – is possibly too small even for the smallest event, and there is no existing map. However, the surrounding area is due to be developed into various new parks over the next six years, so a map of this area could grow with the developments.
8. West Ham Park – quite small (80 acres), but pleasant, could probably sustain a small summer park race. Not yet mapped for orienteering.
9. Wanstead Flats – a large, but very flat and simple area, unfortunately split up into three sections by two busy roads. Already mapped by CHIG.
10. Wanstead Park – a ruined, historic estate, very dense vegetation in places, but used by CHIG fairly regularly for summer events – would possibly be more suited for winter events due to the extent of the vegetation growth!

Also:

• Regent’s Park (LOK) – not on the map here. Newly mapped by LOK, they are keen to stage an event in this royal park which will also be a venue for the London Olympics.
• The Olympic Park itself. Much of it will become available to the public, and therefore potentially for orienteering, in summer 2013.

No orienteering club is based in the East End – indeed, London’s four orienteering clubs sort of converge on this point. London OK (LOK) is based around Hampstead and is generally active in London’s north-west quadrant. Chigwell OC (CHIG) is based around Epping Forest in the north-east. Dartford OK (DFOK) generally runs events in the south-east of the capital. Finally, South London OW (SLOW) is mainly based in the south-west, around Wimbledon and Kingston. There are a couple of SLOW maps in the East End – but only because I live there and have created them!

This means that a collaboration between the four clubs would make sense, for any London 2012-themed series planned for the future.