We are landing in Manchester and planning on renting a car for part of our trip. First Air B&B is in Macclesfield, and we plan on driving to Liverpool. Second Air B&B is in Leamington Spa and are planning to explore the Cotswolds from there. Does any have any recommendations for a good road map?
Posted by
Columbus, USA
397 posts
For our last 2 trips to Italy and England/Wales, we used Google Maps on our iphone and it was completely adequate for western and southern England and all of Wales. Google Maps provides real-time traffic updates, which re-routed us around traffic jams a couple of times(!) I downloaded the Here application and maps onto my iphone as a backup so that when we couldn't get to the internet we still had a complete map and navigation capabilities (this happened a few times, particularly in Wales, that we didn't have sufficient phone service to reach the internet). The Here application is inexpensive and surprisingly good. Google Maps was superior to Here when routing to Point of Interest type locations, e.g. locations that don't have a street number or even a street name in some cases. Both of these applications will assist you in taking the correct exit in traffic circles and finding the right obscure country road to take, so a huge help.
Ordinance Survey paper maps seem to be regarded: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ and seem to be the gold standard.
They offer maps of different granularity based on your needs, e.g. more detailed if you're walking, less detailed for driving. Some of these maps are also available to download to your phone. I ordered OS maps through Amazon. It took several weeks for them to arrive. We rarely used the paper versions, however, since the applications mentioned above worked for all scenarios we encountered except for Cotswolds walks.
Posted by
UK
1015 posts
For driving, buy a road atlas at any petrol station.
Posted by
Royaume-Uni nul points, pas plus
2600 posts
The AA, RAC, and Collins all publish road atlases - look for them in petrol stations, W H Smith at the airport.
The Ordnance Survey maps are excellent for walking but not so much for driving.
Posted by
2599 posts
Buy a road atlas at a petrol station or big supermarket - where they are near the newspapers & magazines - normally. They can cost from £2 to £12. Here is Google Maps live with the traffic shown in colours with red = jams.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.3555013,-2.4903553,11z/data=!5m1!1e1
Can you see the green area to the east? That is a more scenic area that you make wish to drive to from Macclesfield. Consider driving to Buxton & Chatsworth in this area. https://www.chatsworth.org
Posted by
Glasgow, Scotland
1694 posts
My atlas of choice is the Collins, but all of them use the mapping from the Ordinance Survey, so all of them will do the job.
The 2018 ones come out next month, but really any atlas of the last five to ten years should be ok. The 2015 Collins atlases are on amazon.com for only a few dollars.