Long time readers (and followers of my Flickr stream) might remember that a couple of years ago I developed an obsession with taking photos of the City of London Livery Halls. The obsession waned when I stop working in the City but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been wandering around the city a bit and have noticed some maps pointing to halls that aren’t in my collection yet. So at some point soon I’ll start trying to get photos of those (I think I’m missing half dozen or so).
But then I started thinking about maybe organising a walk round the City one weekend to see as many of the halls as possible. And, of course, in order to do that you need a map showing where they all are. And the easiest way to plot random points on a map is to use the “My Maps” feature in Google Maps.
So, after a couple of hours work – here is a map showing the London Livery Halls. Actually, currently it only shows the ones I’ve photographed. I’ll add the missing ones soon. I’ll also add more information to each pin – the address, a link to their web site and perhaps a photo. But I think it’s interesting and useful as it stands, so I thought it was working mentioning it even though it’s still a work in progress.
I would offer you some code to generate some maps like this using tags and geocoding on flickr, but it is a particularly ugly piece of PHP and serously needs an overhaul. If nothing else it is at least one version of the google maps API behind.