Mapping out the elephants in the Elephant Parade.

You may have seen in the media over the last couple of months that elephants have taken over London. No, it’s not a strange concept for a film, but the charity Elephant Family having their annual Elephant Parade.

Elephant Parade is a conservation campaign that shines a multi-coloured spotlight on the urgent crisis faced by the endangered Asian elephant. Brought to you by www.elephantfamily.org, the event sees over 250 brightly painted life-size elephants located over central London this summer.

This year the campaign is even bigger than before and to help visitors to London find all the elephants around the capital, Lovell Johns were asked to create a user-friendly map of all the elephant locations. The team planning the Elephant Parade wanted a map to reflect their fresh image, but also one that would be clear and easy to read.

This project was completed in April and it was the first where we have used Ordnance Survey OpenData to create the map. To cope with the influx of visitors, in part due to the massive amount of publicity the Elephant Parade was getting, they were printing 250,000 copies. Using OS OpenData made them a huge saving in print royalties, which would have been considerable for that number of copies, and to be honest they’ve got more important things to spend their money on! The mapping was based on OS Streetview, then generalised to create the overview style mapping they wanted. This is a really good example of how OS OpenData mapping, now available freely to all, can be made into something really special for a specific project.

The data was then styled to be bright, modern and fun. Illustrations were created for the major landmarks around London to make the map easier to navigate. The elephants weren’t added by hand, rather our expert GIS team georeferenced the postcodes to give our designer the exact geographical location of each elephant with its relevant index number. The elephants were then styled depending on their category (indoor, outdoor and ‘happy herd’) and cartographically positioned to avoid clashes with map features and other elephants close by.

Their campaign has been a huge success and has certainly raised the profile of the endangered Asian elephant. Further information about the parade can be found at www.elephantparadelondon.org/. If you missed the Elephant Parade this year, make sure you go next year; it’s bound to be even better.

For more information on bespoke mapping for any requirement visit our bespoke mapping page at Lovell Johns.