The government-backed national mapping agency for Great Britain said it was “disappointed” with an article published in The Telegraph claiming that new plans to be introduced gradually over the next few years would see maps “for vast areas of the country”, excluding popular sites such as the Lake District, only available to order as opposed to being routinely printed and kept in stock.
In a statement, OS said the report was “simply not true” and stressed that it was “committed to maintaining a national series of paper versions of both OS Explorer and OS Landranger maps”.
The statement continued: “Users will continue to be able to purchase paper maps covering the whole of Great Britain from many outlets, including our own online map shop.
“Paper maps are an important and iconic part of the Ordnance Survey brand and we strongly feel that they remain an essential part of the outdoors market, working alongside digital products and apps.”
OS maps are printed by Frome-based book and catalogue printer Butler, Tanner & Dennis (BT&D), which won a four-year contract to print the portfolio in September 2010 as OS moved to outsource its print operation. At the time of the award it was estimated that the contract was worth around £8m-£10m.
BT&D declined to comment on the current situation.
In 2013 OS sold 1.9m paper maps, down from 3.5m copies at their peak of sales in the early 1990s, making a 7% revenue contribution to the agency’s £142m annual turnover, the majority of which is made from licensing digital mapping data to emergency services, satellite navigation developers and insurance companies.
Speaking to PrintWeek, an OS spokeswoman said that OS maps would continue to provide national coverage in printed form “to meet customer demand” with availability both in-store and online.
“Increasingly stores are looking at the return they get from their shelf space and clearly they may in the future choose not to stock the entire national coverage range.
“We will still be producing and printing them but you may not be able to walk into every WH Smith or Waterstones and pick up each individual map. There are more than 600 and that is a lot of shelf space.
“This is nothing new, we continually assess how we print more efficiently in order to meet customer needs and that depends on what the retailers and wholesalers are selling.”
Meanwhile, OS is currently holding a map amnesty until 30 April encouraging customers to send in their old paper maps in return for discount on an updated digital version. The OS Explorer and Landranger maps are updated every two to five years.
“We want to encourage people to use more up-to-date maps because areas change and we don’t want people going out and getting lost for example,” she said.
The old maps will potentially be used by OS to work with community groups as a basis for teaching navigation skills.
