[R] Drawing maps of UK

[Roger Bivand]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, dr mike wrote:

> The package blighty allows you to draw the UK coastline.

Yes, everyone outside the US gets good, free data from the US government,
like coastlines, but has to jump through hoops to get administrative area
boundary files, that in the US are simply free for downloading. My best
guess is that http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/ and an *.ac.uk address should
get you to files with the appropriate boundaries for academic use. From
there, you will have a choice of formats (probably e00, shapefile, or
MapInfo) and matching R packages for reading the formats (RArcInfo,
maptools/shapefiles, Rmap). It may be that Barry Rowlingson has a database
of county boundaries, but it is not unlikely in Europe that such data
cannot be redistributed, sadly.

Roger

> 
> Regards
> 
> Mike
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of michael watson
> (IAH-C)
> Sent: 08 February 2005 13:25
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Drawing maps of UK
> 
> Hi
> 
> I have downloaded the maps package from CRAN, along with a few other
> map* packages that I could find - but there didn't seem to be data on the
> UK.
> 
> What I actually want to do (finally) is draw some maps of data that I have
> which is organised by postcode (sort of equivalent of US Zip code for those
> who don't know).  I think this may be quite ambitious, but I wanted to see
> just how far I could get with R.
> 
> I have seen examples on the list (e.g.
> http://www.r-project.org/nocvs/mail/r-help/2000/4480.html) giving examples
> of drawing maps of the UK at county level
> (map("uk",fill=T,color=pop.colour)) but this didn't work on my system - as I
> don't seem to have the correct data for the UK.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help
> 
> Mick
> 
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no