Ordnance Survey – Great Britain's national mapping agency

Map symbols

19 September 2006

Maps are crammed full of information. Not only do they show you the routes and types of road or path, they detail millions of points of interest and landmarks. Writing the name of each of these onto a map would be totally impractical as the map would become terribly cluttered and unreadable. Instead, we use standardised symbols to represent features on the ground. Windmills, schools, woods, battle sites, nature reserves and golf courses all have their own individual symbol, as do hundreds of other features.

These symbols are shown on the legend of each paper map; depending on the scale, the same symbols may not be shown on each map, as different scales show varying levels of detail.

As a quick-reference guide, you can download the following guides to map symbols (pdf documents).

• 1:25 000 scale map symbols with access land (English)
• 1:25 000 scale map symbols without access land (Welsh)
• 1:50 000 scale map symbols (English)
• 1:50 000 scale map symbols (Welsh)

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