See also Where’s Geo? Londinium!, Where’s Geo? London Map Fair and Beyond, and Where’s Geo? Canterbury, Dover, and…

Wandering around London and environs, one is quick to stumble into UNESCO World Heritage sites. What are these? Basically, they are historical locations of cultural and natural importance worth preserving and sharing with current and future generations of humanity. Given we were looking for these kinds of places in our travel, it’s not surprising we found several, however, it is wonderful to see such a concentration of them here as there are only 851 such entities currently on the UNESCO list for the entire planet!

Some time ago, our good friends at the National Geographic Society’s Maps Division provided us with a global lat/lon database they had produced as part of a custom cartographic map project for UNESCO World Heritage. From this database, I extracted the handful of locations that we had visited and saved them as a TXT file, but I wanted site content connections too.

Exploring the United Kingdom portion of the UNESCO World Heritage site, I obtained the Web page addresses for the locations we had visited and added this as a field for each record in the TXT. The summation of my work is available in the downloadable 1KB TXT file.

Going to the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, I loaded the “World Streets Map” from the “Content” menu. This also launched ArcGIS Explorer. I then imported my UNESCO TXT file tagging each location with the “camera” symbol—an apropos icon.

Four of the five locations we visited are in the London area with the fifth about 50 miles east in Canterbury, site of an earlier blog entry. The map below highlights the London quartet: Each with a focus and panache all their own. Again the space of a screenshot makes it difficult to explore each—the two unidentified locations are Westminster Cathedral and Greenwich Maritime (more on the latter in a subsequent entry).

The UNESCO site also includes a KML file of the current heritage listing. ArcGIS Explorer can ably add the KML data. Each site also carries a Web link for more information, such as the Cornwall and West Devon mining landscape site…which we will be visiting later in our trip.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager