Hidden Britain Map: 26 Maps of Nuclear Targets, Gibbets and Ghosts
Nuclear targets of 1967, a lighthouse diary, gibbets, phone taps, 21,089 postboxes, Porton Down over Salisbury, boggles, stinkpipes and lost villages.
Updated
The United Kingdom has 108,537 maps on MapIndex, and its mapmakers keep lists. One
writer has touched lighthouse after lighthouse since 2018 and written a diary entry at
each; another sorts 21,089 postboxes by the monarch on the door. Someone typed out how
many megatons each town would have received in 1967, someone else counts the people
who live beside the road the nuclear warheads take. Between them lie gibbets and plague
pits, boggles and black dogs, sewer vents spotted from train windows and the Highland
Clearances, kept in Gaelic place names.
London gets eight 1-megaton missiles and two 500-kiloton bombs, more than any other of the 105 targets on this list of November 1967. Glasgow, Birmingham and Liverpool get four 1 MT missiles each, Cardiff and Manchester two. Then come the RAF and USAF bomber bases from Lossiemouth to Lakenheath and Upper Heyford, the Polaris bases at Faslane and Holy Loch, and the radio masts at Rugby, Criggion and Anthorn that spoke to submarines. Some towns are marked “(possible target)” as former regional seats of government, among them Brecon, Kidderminster, Armagh and the small Devon harbour of Salcombe.
“06/10/18 Berwick-upon-Tweed. Walk from St. Abbs to Berwick-upon Tweed, 16 miles. Sunshine, cold. Wearing blue jeans, check shirt, donkey jacket, Nikes.” So begins a project to touch every lighthouse and beacon, each touched light a dated diary entry. At Leith Eastern Breakwater it is two cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, one in each pocket, and seagulls over the sewage works; at Trinity Buoy Wharf the pub cat jumps on the writer’s lap. Over the years a life moves into the entries: on 14 February 2025, at Inchkeith, the writer stands at a monitor watching a baby’s heart rate dip. The 710 points reach from the Channel Islands to Shetland and Ireland, with a layer of lights still to touch.
The Murder Act of 1752 let courts hang a murderer’s body in chains, and this map places 155 gibbets from then until hanging in chains was abolished in 1834, one layer per decade. The decades tell the story: 36 bodies in the 1760s, 28 in the 1790s, then 4 in the 1800s and a single one in the 1820s. The highwayman Jeremiah Abershaw hangs on Wimbledon Common in 1795, William Jobling near Jarrow in 1832. Where the place is unsure, the note quotes the old record, such as “Brow of Haldown” or “Padnal by the Littleport Turnpike”. The map belongs to the exhibition of the University of Leicester and Wellcome Trust project “Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse”.
One London criminal claimed to have disrupted police phone taps by lifting a manhole cover outside Clive House and dropping a stick of gelignite into it. This map of nine interception sites runs in layers from the mid-1950s to the 1980s: MI5’s intercepts at Leconfield House, the Post Office headquarters at St Martin Le Grand, where the phones of Great Train Robbery suspects were tapped in 1963, and the research station at Dollis Hill, where tapping and bugging devices were developed. Its last stop is “Tinkerbell” at 93 Ebury Bridge Road, the purpose-built tapping hub that the journalist Duncan Campbell exposed.
Ach’ a’ Choirce, the “oat field”, was cleared around the 1820s, and by local tradition its people were given work carrying the stones of their own houses down to the shore to build a wall. This map holds 1,042 Gaelic place names of the Applecross peninsula, each with its English meaning and a note, and the notes keep returning to the clearances. Àirigh Dhriseach, the “shieling of the brambles”, became a sheep farm in the winter of 1836/37 and most of its people were moved to Culduie. An Àird Dhubh, where people were sent after the estate was “improved” by the 7th laird, had no fresh water, so its people rowed across the bay to fill barrels.
Six layers sort these 21,089 postboxes by the royal cipher on the door, from Victoria’s VR to Charles III’s CIIIR, with Edward VIII’s brief reign as a layer of its own. The notes read like a collector’s catalogue: a Queen Victoria box “made by Handyside” in Dingle, Liverpool, an Edward VIII Type B box on Buccleugh Street in Birkenhead. Gold boxes honour Olympic champions such as Sarah Storey and Charlotte Dujardin, one Charles III box is a lamp box set back in a hedge, and one note warns of a fake box 30 metres further along the terrace, “black and gold”.
In August 1960 an aircraft, a Valetta or Hastings, flew a 100-mile arc about 40 miles from Salisbury and released zinc cadmium sulphide at a pound per mile. The particles were the size of a real biological warfare agent, 1 to 5 microns, small enough to reach the deepest part of the lungs. This map rebuilds the Porton Down trial point by point: the spraying arc, the numbered rural sampling stations, each run by a member of Porton’s staff with a Drum Impactor drawing 20 litres of air a minute, the urban points given Millipore filters, and the control room in the forecast room of the Meteorology Research Division. A note adds that a similar series was later run over Norwich.
The Salterbeck Boggle comes as four drunken sailors carrying a coffin, and the party vanishes in the middle of the beck. A boggle is Cumbria’s word for a local apparition, and this map places 63 of them with a dry wit: the headless woman of Branthwaite wails and screams for her head, “though how a headless woman does that is unclear!”. The Jemmy Boggle, “bad Lord Lowther” with his coach and six, made Lowther Hall uninhabitable until a Catholic priest laid him to rest under Walla Crag. The boggle of Ewanrigg near Maryport, a quoted book says, gave Wilkie Collins the opening chapters of The Woman in White.
The V-2 that hit New Cross Road on 25 November 1944 demolished a Woolworths full of shoppers and killed 168, the worst toll from a single V-2 in England. This map lists 310 strikes on London and the counties around it, each with its date, its dead and often its damage, up to Hughes Mansions on Vallance Road, 134 dead on 27 March 1945, the last V-2 to hit London. Readers add what they remember: one man’s father was on his first day of work in Charterhouse Street when the rocket hit Smithfield Market, and another insists Hazelhurst Road was struck on a different day and that far more died than the 35 on the map.
Victorian sewers breathe through tall iron columns called stinkpipes, and someone has logged 233 of them, most in southeast London. One was “seen from the train leaving Blackheath Station”, another “discovered using Google Streetview”. One stands between the pavement and a cycle path, “almost hidden by a huge traffic sign”, one in Woolwich is “slightly subterranean!”, and one keeps company with a Kwik Fit in Lee. The notes name the maker, Ham Baker, record a rare concrete stinkpipe in Welling and a pipe whose crown “looks like it’s coming off”.
The gable at Free Derry Corner appears again and again: “You are now entering Free Derry” in 1979, 1982, 1983, 1989 and 1996, and in 2020 with a salute to NHS key workers. This catalogue holds 12,640 murals across Northern Ireland, mostly in Belfast and Derry, each with its number and year, Republican, Loyalist and neither. Since a wall is entered anew each time it is repainted, the map shows how the same few metres of brick changed their message over forty years, from Mandela in 1988 to the Museum of Free Derry in 2019.
An experimental silo, built to test what would happen if a Blue Streak were launched from underground, lay hidden beneath the forest at Spadeadam for almost forty years and was only rediscovered in 2003. This map walks the Cumbrian range in 15 sites: Greymare Hill, where complete Blue Streak launch vehicles were tested and watched from a concrete bunker; test stand C3, finished in 1962, the rails for its mobile launch tower still on the causeway; C2, finished only in 1965 and apparently never fully commissioned; and the British Oxygen Company compound that made up to 100 tons of liquid oxygen. Other sections of rocket, a note says, are believed buried across the site at unknown locations.
“Brymbo Steelworks: looks phenomenal 10/10.” An urban explorer has scored 399 derelict sites, most of them in the mill towns around Rochdale, Oldham and Saddleworth. Hartford Mill “looks maybe worth a visit about a 4/10”, a steam crane earns 8.5, a steam-driven pump 10 with the sigh “may be impossible to get to now :(”. Barnes Hospital was visited on 29 August 2009 and got a 9. Between the ratings sit Geograph photos, among them the closed Astley Green Colliery, whose pithead is the last in the whole Lancashire coalfield.
Each of the 367 starling roosts carries a running log marked NEW, REACTIVATED or DEACTIVATED, with dates. At Lavell’s Lake in Reading visitors from Maidenhead arrived at 6:45 in the morning in February 2026 and found no starlings: a local told them the birds had left once the flooding started. Little Mere at Marbury went quiet in January 2023 and was back in November 2025 with about 10,000 birds. In Brighton a small murmuration of 100 to 200 gathers over a retail park on the A27, “just above the Toby Carvery”.
Nuclear warheads travel by road between RNAD Coulport near Helensburgh and AWE Burghfield in Berkshire, and this map draws the routes and counts who lives beside them. Birmingham, on the M6, has 1,346,154 people, 426 schools and 18 hospitals along the way; Glasgow, on the M8, 776,370 people; Oxford, on the A34, 200,293. Fourteen places are counted like this, from Stirling on the M9 to Slough on the M4.
“A digging machine building the Victoria line in the 1960s merrily chewed straight into a forgotten plague pit,” this map notes at Green Park. It marks 35 plague burial grounds and suspected pits with gallows humour: Knightsbridge Green ends “Dig there if you dare!”, and Vincent Square asks the Royal Horticultural Society over the road not to plant anything too deep. More than 50,000 bodies went into Charterhouse Square in the Black Death of 1348; St Giles-in-the-Fields recorded more than 3,000 plague deaths in a parish of fewer than 2,000 homes. On Shepherd’s Bush Green, local rumour says, planning permission is refused for fear of what lies beneath.
The timeline starts with a pact of 1669 between MacIain of Glencoe and Campbell of Inverawe and follows the oath he could not swear in time. King James’s authorisation reaches Invergarry on 23 December 1691; MacIain gets to Fort William on the 30th and is sent on to a sheriff at Inveraray, 60 miles away, where he swears on 6 January. Glenlyon’s soldiers are quartered three to five to a cottage through the glen, and at 5:00 a.m. on 13 February the settlements are marked one by one, each with its name on maps from Blaeu’s atlas of 1654 to the Ordnance Survey of 1842. One entry wonders whether Leacantuim was part of the massacre, though the literature never names it.
In Dorchester prison, where 91 conscientious objectors were held, the inmates made a secret paper called Instigilio, written entirely in Esperanto and bound in cloth. This map of resistance to the First World War counts the objectors prison by prison. Pentonville held 131, among them Isaac Hall, who had come to England from Jamaica in May 1914 and assumed his colour would exempt him from conscription, until he was arrested and handed over to the Army. Edinburgh’s Calton Gaol held 47, among them Arthur Woodburn, who told his tribunal in February 1916, “I do not believe in war.”
On 4 August 1577, after its visit to Bungay church, “a black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse” entered the church at Blythburgh the same day. This folklore map follows the Black Dog across Britain, thickest in East Anglia: the ghost dog “Shock”, recorded by Amelia Opie in 1829, runs between Overstrand and Beeston looking for its two owners; Conan Doyle stayed at Cromer on a golfing holiday in 1901, perhaps the seed of The Hound of the Baskervilles; and in 1980 a young woman met a yellow-eyed hound near Wisbech. It is part of a public archaeology and mythogeography project led by Nick Stone, and it reaches abroad to related figures such as the Wild Hunt.
The Solway Junction Railway was built to carry Cumbrian ironstone to Clydeside; its viaduct closed in 1921 and the line in 1933. This map holds 3,924 closed lines, stations and halts, each line with its dates: the Cleator and Workington Junction, the “Track of the Ironmasters”, lost its passengers in 1931 and its freight in 1963. The notes say what is left: track “still in situ, in abandoned condition” from Preston towards Longridge, a formation at Fleetwood “now built over by A585 road”, a bridge demolished after the last coal trains left Bickershaw Colliery in 1992.
Tottington was “lost to the MoD in 1942”, and its church now stands in the middle of a training ground; Shipden was lost to the sea before Domesday. This map marks 268 deserted villages and churches in Norfolk and how each was lost or found. The tower of Eccles church stood on the beach as late as 1900 until a storm brought it down; at Thuxton, excavation revealed more than 29 tofts; Bawsey was dug live over three days by Time Team in 1999. Several more, West Tofts and Buckenham Tofts among them, lie inside the Stanford Training Area.
Made for a campaign against mass surveillance, this map marks 790 fixed number plate recognition cameras, and the notes are typed by hand. Many are in Northern Ireland: “M1 Motorway. Dungannon. Set of 6 cameras both East and Westbound”, a set of three with CCTV on Main Street in Belcoo, both decks of Craigavon Bridge in Derry. In England they line the roads into Torbay, from Brixham Road to the A380 at Newton Abbot.
Two, possibly three, of the six prefabs on Plum Street in Norton were still lived in at a site visit on 2 July 2017. This map tracks Britain’s post-war prefabricated homes in layers: still inhabited or reused, demolished, kept in museums, Swedish houses and the London County Council’s mobiles. Each entry counts the homes and links an old map: 100 Tarran prefabs on Sackville Road in Sunderland, recently refurbished, or 52 re-clad Arcons in Kilmarnock, found through a freedom of information request.
Before radar, Britain listened for enemy aircraft with concrete dishes, and this map finds 16 of these acoustic early-warning mirrors. Most are on the Kent coast: Denge has three, of 20, 30 and 200 feet, and Hythe a 30-foot mirror beside the remains of a fallen 20-foot one. On the northeast coast the author is still asking: the Seaham mirror, built around 1916 and thought to stand into the 1950s, comes with “Do you remember it, or know anything about it?”. The Selsey mirror has been converted into a house, and the one on Malta is called Il-Widna, “the ear”.
The bells of Kilgrimol priory, legend says, still sound beneath the waves off St Anne’s-on-Sea, and the name is real: it appears in a land grant of 1199. This map of 35 places lost to the sea or buried by sand keeps documents apart from antiquarian claims and legend. The storms of 6 December 1553 come up again and again: at Biggar the Duchy tenants lost fourteen acres of pasture, five of arable land and one of meadow, and 1,800 days’ work had to be set aside to repair the ditches.
The first Bell End on this list is marked “essential?: N”; the second, “Bell End (another one)”, gets a Y. Someone planned a road trip of four days to Britain’s rudest and funniest names, each stop linked to a Street View image of the sign: Backside Lane, Balls Cross, Bitchfield and many more, on a final list beside six route layers from Day 1 to Day 4.
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