Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 October 31

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October 31

England's grey areas

Google Maps shows two large unidentified grey areas, one west of London, the other north of Leeds. What are they? Military? ‑‑Mandruss ☎ 06:46, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

What are the coordinates? Plasmic Physics (talk) 07:03, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Approx centers --- west of London 51.427, -1.543 --- north of Leeds 54.209, -2.171 ‑‑Mandruss ☎ 07:48, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Both areas seem to coincide partially with the footprints of some Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Unfortunately it appears that Google doesn't provide a Key to their map colours. Nanonic (talk) 08:02, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

It appears the western area could be the North Wessex Downs and the northern is the Yorkshire Dales (from looking at the map here. Nanonic (talk) 08:09, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Neither area shows grey for me, all details are visible. One is near Chilton Foliat in Wiltshire, the other is near Hubberholme in North Yorkshire. Richard Avery (talk) 08:17, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Stanford Training Area is a closed military area and Google is shading it red.[1] They've got the boundary wrong though, it's the area with the boundary marked "danger area" (surrounded dotted red if you zoom out a level) in the Ordnance Survey map.[2] Thincat (talk) 08:58, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I noticed the overlap with North Wessex Downs AONB, but as mentioned above it's not a very good overlap. And the northern area is even worse, judging by the map in Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I also wondered why there aren't a lot more grey areas, if those are AONBs. In the U.S., equivalent areas such as national parks and national forests are in green, and military areas such as White Sands Missile Range are in grey. That's why I thought these might be military areas, such as perhaps restricted flight areas. I can't explain why Richard Avery doesn't see the grey, if he is using Google Maps. I see the grey in both the old and the new versions of Google Maps. ‑‑Mandruss ☎ 09:20, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I think Nanonic is correct. If you enter your coordinates in GeoLocator, and then switch back and forth between the Google map and the Open Street Map, the same areas that are tinted gray in Google are tinted green in OSM and labeled "North Wessex Downs AONB" and "Yorkshire Dales National Park". Why Google has Yorkshire Dales gray rather than green (like Lake District NP and North York Moors NP, for instance) is not clear to me. Deor (talk) 10:31, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I would have thought that if there are ony two 'grey areas' on the aerial view of England, the map must have been put together on a rare day of exceptionally and unusually fine weather here in England :) KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 12:19, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

This forum thread seems to suggest that the colour code in Google maps depends on which local provider gave Google permission to use their maps. So, don't expect consistency. If you could track down the source of the maps, you might get a better answer. The identification as the two AONBs seems to be correct. Fiddlersmouth (talk) 12:33, 31 October 2014 (UTC)