Churches Dedicated to St Laurence in the British Isles
When we started the heritage project, we knew that we wanted to implement a Heritage Trail that included all churches dedicated to St Laurence/St Lawrence in the British Isles.
The first thing that was required was a lot of research to both identify the churches with appropriate dedications, but also to find contact details etc so that we could offer the results of our research to the other churches as well.
Our intial thought was that we could use a touchscreen to show all of the churches with supplementary details such as photos, and this is something that we did, and it is operational in the Priory. In addition, however, we became convinced that we could produce something really special by providing a large format map of the British Isles and plotting the location of all the churches so that it was immediately visible.
Working with our graphics consultant, Andy from Scaryfish (Canada), we worked out exactly what type of map we required – it needed to be simple so that map details did not obscure the church locations, and also in vector format so that we could use it on a huge display. Our searches led us to a perfect map for our purposes from Maproom.
That could have been all we needed, but an email from us asking Maproom a technical question resulted in Rosalyn from Maproom asking us what we intended using the map for. When we told her, she answered “This may be your lucky day……”
Indeed it was. We supplied the location data for all the churches to Ros, and she geomapped them all onto the map – not only saving us at least one month of work, but also ensuring that the data would always be relative to the map no matter how we re-sized it. Oh, she also did all of this work on our behalf for FREE. (click on the images for a larger version)
The Touchscreen
The Large Map
Rosalyn had not yet finished with her offer of support for us. As well as presenting us with a beautifully designed vector map, with all the churches Geomapped, even to the extent of adding numbers that coordinated with our requirements, Maproom also created on online version of the map for our use.
The interactive map is presented below. You can use your mouse wheel (or the zoom controls in the bottom right corner) to zoom in and out of the map, showing different levels. All of the churches dedicated to St Laurence/St Lawrence are shown with a church icon. Click on any church location will open an image of the church, along with the location of the church, including postcode.
