Maps of the Week

I've had a lot of fun this week exploring the geographical distribution of place-names with Places!. Places! allows you to map the relative density of place-names in different countries around the world. Using the application you can enter place-name prefixes or suffixes and view a map showing the geographic distribution of place-names containing those terms.

For example, in the UK we can enter the place-name suffixes of -thorpe and -thwaite to see where the Vikings settled in Britain. The resulting map shows that these two place-name endings are popular throughout the area that was once known as the Danelaw, following the Viking invasions of the ninth century.

In the USA you could search for the distribution of the San- or Santa- prefixes to see where there might have been a strong Spanish influence in place-names. On the other hand the suffix -ville might be a good indication of where French immigrants originally settled in the USA.


This Paris building age map proved to be the most popular map on Maps Mania this week. BatiParis: Période de Construction des Immeubles Parisiens maps the age of buildings in central Paris. It is also a rather good example of the building age genre of interactive mapping.

Like other building age maps BatiParis uses a choropleth layer to show the age of buildings, with each building colored according to its year of construction. If you zoom in on the map important historical buildings are also shown on the map with interactive map markers.

Like other good building age maps BatiParis allows you to filter the buildings shown on the map by age of construction. For example, select the 1851-1914 range and you can view this major period of construction in the French capital, a result of Haussmann's renovation of Paris in the later half of the nineteenth century.


Twenty Years before John Snow famously mapped the locations of cholera victims in London's Broad Street Robert Baker plotted the deaths of cholera victims in Leeds.

Maps in the Age of Cholera is a story map based around Robert Baker's 'Sanitary Map of the Town of Leeds' exploring the 1832 cholera epidemic in this Yorkshire town. Baker never made the link between cholera and contaminated water. However, in his map and in the accompanying report to the Leeds Board of Health, Baker noted that "the disease was worst in those parts of the town where there is often an entire want of sewage, drainage and paving".

The map itself uses this Leaflet Story Map plug-in. The Leaflet Story Map library uses jQuery to create a scroll driven story map. The map tiles scheme for Robert Baker's 1832 'Sanitary Map of the Town of Leeds' comes from Wikimaps Warper.