How to make an Ordnance Survey map for your wall

 Many years ago, I stayed at a Youth Hostel where the warden had papered on wall with Bartholomew's Half-Inch maps covering all of Wales and the borders.   This inspired me to do something similar with OS 1:50,000 maps in the first house I bought. It was quite difficult because some of the map sheets had been printed at different times to different standards. There were woods that changed their shade of green half way across and and "C" was missing from "Cotswold Hills".

It's a lot easier today as the OS (and some of their distributors)  offer what are essentially paper prints from their database. The actual map area of the sheets is 80cm  x 80cm corresponding to 20km x 20km (1:25,000) or 40km x 40km (1:50,000). You can specify the exact centre point of the map you want so I chose my house. 

(Actually, that's not quite true, you can only specify the nearest Postcode and the software jumps to the grid reference for that. If you wanted to order more than one map and put them on a wall as wallpaper, you would be unlikely to be able to get a map that was centred exactly 20/40km from the next. I was planning to have just one 80cm square so that wasn't a problem)

Start the ordering process here (Doesn't seem to work well on a mobile)

 The sheets as supplied are larger than 80cm because there's a border and a panel showing what all the symbols mean. If you want to include everything, you're going to need a frame that's 100cm x 89cm which is unlikely to be sitting on a shelf somewhere for you to buy. However, 80cm x 80cm frames are "standard" so that's what I went for. Here's a link to the frame I used (I'm just an ordinary customer)

Frame sizing isn't quite as simple as you might think, take a look at this table:

Advertised frame size	80cm x 80cm
Largest sheet of paper that fits inside	80cm x 80cm
Outside dimensions of the frame	Maybe 85cm x 85cm depending of frame thickness
How much of the map you can actually see	Maybe 79cm x79cm – check with the frame manufacturer,

 You need to make sure:

• that you have a enough wall space for 85cm x 85cm or whatever it is.
• that any features on the maps that are important to you are not too close to the edge

How to cut out your map

You don't need to be super precise with the knife, Sure, you're aiming to cut an 80x80 square but the visible window is typically only 79x79. So just err on the side of making it a tiny bit too small. If you're not "wasting" a few mm of real map all round, you're doing it wrong and the final result won't fit into the frame.

The final result