Everyone,

As many of you are aware, we have an ever growing collection of historical maps available for research and general viewing. You can find these maps at http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps and clicking on any category with "Historic" in the title. The maps contain road features that no longer exist on contemporary maps.

Some of these maps are hosted by third party providers who have kindly given us a licence to use them, but many have been scanned in-house or have been given direct scans from legal deposit libraries to calibrate and tiles. However, these maps do not come for free; the hosting and effort involved in collecting and preparing the maps to go online is an ongoing cost. A typical fee is around £12 a map.

SABRE maps can only function with the goodwill of those willing to donate towards its existence. There will be no charges to view the maps; we simply ask that those who are able to and willing to do so give a donation some consideration.

Some of the mapping projects your money would contribute towards include:

* Post 1923 Half Inch Ministry of Transport Maps
* Quarter Inch "A" Series
* 1932 - 1939 Ten Mile Road Maps
* One Inch Fifth Edition
* Bartholomew Quarter Inch of Great Britain
* 1930s Bartholomew Half Inch of England and Wales

Thanks everyone,
Bryn (on behalf of those who make the maps happen).

If you're using the PayPal donate button on the Maps page, please make sure you fill in the Purpose of Donation box with Maps fund if you want your donation to go to that purpose. Otherwise it'll go into the general pool for server costs. Also note that if you send in funds from a credit or debit card, the donation amount will be reduced by the fees that PayPal charge.

Please send me a private message if you'd like to donate by other means.

In addition to Bryn's appeal:

If you own copies of any out-of-copyright mapping that does not currently feature on SABRE Maps, especially of those types listed by Bryn, please consider donating scans of the maps or allowing us access to complete the scans. Some of the mapping that we are looking for is relatively rare and is not held by legal deposit libraries such as the British Library or the National Library of Scotland.

If you do lend us mapping, we will do our utmost to see that the originals are safely returned to you as soon as possible.

If you are aware that someone/somewhere holds copies of relevant out-of-copyright mapping that is not currently available on SABRE Maps, then please either mention it to us so that we can approach them, or if they are personally known to you, ask them.

We are also extremely interested in extending our coverage of Ireland, but both SABRE and those members who have donated map scans from their private collections currently possess very little mapping of the early days of numbering in Ireland, and help here would be appreciated.

Thanks to people donating money, SABRE Maps now has full coverage of the original 1922-23 MoT Road Maps, meaning that we are the only place on the Internet to do so. These are, if you don't know, the earliest official maps of the road numbering system in Great Britain. More information about them can be found on the SABRE Wiki at OS Ministry of Transport Road Map.

We hope to soon have full coverage of the Northern Ireland equivalents - the Road Map of Northern Ireland thanks to someone promising the donation of map scans.

Thanks once again to all who have donated, be it map scans or money.

Since I wrote the above, the Northern Ireland Road Map coverage has been placed on SABRE Maps, though they are currently on inaccurately dated layers.


To put into perspective the costs of bringing SABRE Maps, the original 1939 Ten Mile Road Map is held by the University of Cambridge Library. They agreed that we could publish their scans of the map (which are copyright CUL) free of charge, subject to suitable credit being given. They also allowed us to have the map scans done at their internal recharge rates.

However, when they came to scan the map, they discovered that it was not in the best of conditions so required being sent to their conservation team. The cost of this work was (fortunately for us) absorbed by CUL.

The actual costs of scanning the maps as there are two sheets, each being roughly A0 in size came out at £20 each, plus VAT, plus postage, plus the cost of a DVD as they are too large for their FTP servers to cope with.

Saw that today! Many many thanks to all who have been working on this. Immensely useful for research.

This is fantastic!

Thank you very much!

Unfortunately I don't have any maps to contribute, however, I do have access to a large A0 scanner at work. Is this of any use to the project?

Absolutely and totally. Most of the stuff I've done has been on my work's A3 scanner using Hugin to botch them altogether. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go back and redo all the calibration and tiling work on new scans, but somebody else might.

I've just rediscovered dad's old AA handbook from 1955. 44 pages of maps ( UK mainland & Isle of Skye) ,possibly still copyright of AA( or OS ,as they're based on maps sanctioned by HM Stationery Office) . Shouldn't be too much to scan ,but I suspect copyright might possibly be a problem .

As those are not Crown Copyright, we can't use them until at least 2026, although the AA were known to rip off the OS, which makes it even more complicated.

Sabre Maps are, in my view, the jewel in the crown of the Sabre Wiki project -- and I'm feeling that it's probably about time I should be making a modest monetary contribution towards its running costs (quick, quick -- before the next bill comes in!).

Can those who know remind us what the most effective way is for Sabristi to send in at least a few of their hard-earned pence?

Subsidiary question (I know the answer is already out there somewhere in the Forum archives, but I'm feeling too tired to search properly at the moment!) --

Why does clicking on certain "historical maps" produce only pink or black screens for some of us?

In practice, this isn't an overwhelming hindrance to pursuing what one of us (Steven?) has called "road archaeology" -- but it would be nice, all the same, to know what, if anything, those owning less than state-of-the-art computers (if that be, indeed, the cause of the problem) might be able to do to overcome this "feature".

What browser are you using, and what version?

As before, the problem I have is with a lack of time. In fact, I'll be highly specific, things that I do for free in my spare time are now geared towards stuff me and my other half can do, and sadly writing SABRE Maps code, useful as it is, is not that. (Having spent about seven hours yesterday writing musical scores, I can assure you I don't sit around lazing about for much of my life!) If I somehow get time to do it, then great, I will, but I honestly cannot make any promises.

I don't think anyone else has worked on the code, apart from maybe nowster doing a bit.

I really must have a look at it. Maybe this evening...

Firefox 19.0.2

All work successfully for me on Firefox 19.0.2 except for NPE

These are the results I get (test sample: two roads and one place name). I understand that black means "area not (yet) covered", but what does the pink signify?

Doesn't seem to be working now for me either. I've no idea why OpenLayers chose pink, but it means "fatal error". In your case, for example, trying to access http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/tile.php?l=npe&z=14&x=8195&y=5441, which should redirect to http://a.ooc.openstreetmap.org/npe/14/8195/5441.png generates an error. It works if you browse to the URL directly. NPE and 1:25K are not hosted in-house, so it might be external servers closing the redirect requests. Both work on Google Chrome.

Thanks for the reply, Ritchie.

I've switched several times between Firefox and Opera for one reason or another over the years -- though I tend to stick to just one of them 99% of the time since it's such a faff having to remember two sets of browser conventions, especially when one of them has become near automatic. It's good to know, all the same, that I can go to Opera for all the maps if I need to.

(Can I ask: What browser do you yourself favour for use with SABRE?)

I personally use Google Chrome, but "this site best viewed in [insert browser here]" is soooo 1990s.