What do you think is the best UK road atlas?

[Rillington]

Welcome to Sabre.

For me it is the Collins Road Atlas.

[AndyB]

There was an interim period when OS stopped publishing their own bound atlases, and Philips were allowed to publish dual branded Philips Ordnance Survey atlases. When it changed again so that Philips were simply licenced to use the data, like Collins etc, I stuck with them. I probably don’t have any any more.

The very useful thing Philips did about 20 years ago was to publish street atlases for most of the country. NI was printed in four: Antrim/Londonderry, Down/Armagh, Fermanagh/Tyrone, and derived from the first two, Belfast and its commuter belt. The paucity of street-level atlases of anything in NI other than the larger towns made these special for me.

[Gareth Thomas]

A-Z for me - until fairly recently, when they stopped the details at a lot of junctions and put the non-primary A-road numbers into red boxes, which clogs up the atlas a bit for me. I preferred the old design. Nevertheless they are still my favourite, and I buy a new one every other year for the car.

I have the Philips Explorer too which is great for browsing.

[trickstat]

My Mum has recently got a new A-Z atlas. My main gripe from looking at it so far is that the black lines indicating railway lines could do with being a little bolder as they are tricky to follow in areas with lots of other detail. I do like the index of places of interest that includes postcodes.

Mum is nearly 87 and stopped driving last year, but I'm not the only one in the family who likes browsing maps! One of the things my sister threw out in readiness for Mum downsizing was a Herts road atlas because it was about a 2010 edition. Mum's a little annoyed about that as there appear to be no Herts atlases on the market now to replace it.

[ikcdab]

I just use the memorymap app on my phone or tablet. It has full, seemless OS coverage. I just load up the 1:250k for the overview then can easily zoom into 1:50k or 1:25k for detail. Can't beat it!

[Owain]

I've just realised that I haven't bought a road atlas since 2010 (and the two I bought then were for France and Italy). It must be even longer since I bought one for the UK!

As stated elsewhere, my last one would have been Michelin, which I had expected to be similarly spectacular in detail to their atlases covering France, but I was disappointed to find that it was nothing like as good. It was fine for route planning, but no good for anything more specific than that (the Italian one was similarly disappointing).

As I hate satnav, what I'll do to find a specific location is either look at it in advance on SABRE Maps or Google Street View (I have a photographic memory for maps), or drive to a nearby location and pull over to look at Google Maps on my phone. I probably haven't used a paper map to locate a particular street or building in the entire time I've been a member of SABRE...