The secret world of Russia's Cold War map makers

[beesonthewhatnow]

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

This is rather cool - long before Google maps the Russians had mapped pretty much the entire world, often down to an individual building level. All top secret and not available to anyone outside of the military.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

What a project that would be to have them all online

 

[farmerbarleymow]

That's excellent.

Looked at the example map of Manchester and unsurprisingly Trafford Park and Salford Quays are depicted in a lot of detail.

 

[HAL9000]

I wonder where they got there data, I suspect aviation maps would have been very useful. AWE was removed from OS maps, but it was probably marked as restricted zone on aviation maps.

UK Maps come in from the cold

The UK's official mapping agency, Ordnance Survey (www.getamap.co.uk), has finally returned the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield, at Reading near London, to its most popular Landranger series 1:50000 scale maps, after over 30 years in the secrecy wilderness. The plant had been "airbrushed" from maps since 1974 and just appeared as farmers' fields, but with a suspicious dead end road leading to the middle of the empty space. An update to the more specialist 1:25000 data was made available in January 2005, but this latest revision to the more widely used product marks a significant milestone and sets a useful precedent.

http://cryptome.org/eyeball/awe/awe-eyeball.htm

 

[farmerbarleymow]

I wonder where they got there data, I suspect aviation maps would have been very useful. AWE was removed from OS maps, but it was probably marked as restricted zone on aviation maps.




http://cryptome.org/eyeball/awe/awe-eyeball.htm

The article suggests they used publicly available maps - presumably as a sort of base map - and went from there.