Using openstreetmap + DEFRA LIDAR data. Greenwich university in pride flag colours.

Made for Pride Month 2019.

This is an experiment to see what happens if the sea was one day 5m higher. The docks are all reclaimed land and are quite vulnerable, but the old city (Below Bar) is much higher up.

5m sounds like a lot, but normal tides in Southampton seem to be up to 4m variation (which I assume is +/-2). Predictions on sea level rise by 2100 range from 50cm to 200cm. One bad storm surge could render the lowlying parts of our city unusable. My back of the envelope maths is:
1m sea level rise + 2m high tide + 2m storm surge (last happened in the UK in 2013). https://noc.ac.uk/news/storm-surge-hits-uk-coastline

OK, I know that higher end of those predictions is only 1-5% chance that's not odds normal people would take of a massive disaster.

Crafted in survival over 8 months. This is a model of the beach I played on as a kid.

This version is chopped out of our larger server, so cuts off a bit weirdly at the edges.

Central London under 20m of water. Hopefully we're still a few years away from this!

This is a very approximate model of what London would look like under 6m of water. Parliament square is only about 5 or 6m above sea level and the Thames barrier protects it.. for now. The barrier was expected to be used 2-3 times a year, but is now needed 6-7 times.

Remember with sea level rise, it's not the average that matters, it's how high high tide gets!

Source data: LIDAR from DEFRA using most recent 1m scale DTM & DSM. Map data from openstreetmap.

Inspired by Extinction Rebellion. Keep up the good work.

Built from UKDEFRA LIDAR, Open Streetmap & Wikipedia.

Roughly 10,000 by 11,000 blocks, or 110 Sq km.


On the map on this page, turn on "signs" under markers to see all the wikipedia points of interest.

A new version of Central London for 2019. This version has hollow buildings to make it easier to modify and enhance. It has flowers and tufts on any areas of grass, and signposts marking the location of things mentioned on Wikipedia.

It uses data from Open Streetmap, DEFRA LIDAR and Wikidedia.

by Christopher Gutteridge, @cgutteridge, [email protected]