Latitude, Longitude, OS Grid Refs, National Grid and Mapping Information

This site makes extensive use of mapping and positional information, four position systems are deployed, we use Postcodes to link to external mapping services, and display Latitude - Longitude - OS Grid Refs and British National Grid positions on our location pages. This enables us to show how far a specific location is from the sea and other fixed points, and offer accommodation and other information that is "at or near" a specific reference point. Also useful for GPS users.

Cromer	Lat 52° 55' 56" Long 1° 18' 16" Latitude and Longitude	TG 221422 OS Grid Ref	E 622180 N 342299 British National Grid
The above is an example.

The planet earth is often depicted with a grid of lines covering the surface. These are the Latitude and Longitude lines. Both of these are measured in degrees, minutes and seconds. Example 52° 55' 56"

The latitude lines (sometimes called parallels) run horizontally around the planet in an east west direction like the equator. The equator is 0° and both South and North poles are 90°. All points in the northern hemisphere have a northern latitude and are denoted with an N and S denotes the southern hemisphere.

The longitude lines (sometimes called meridians) run vertically from the north pole to south pole like the Greenwich prime meridian 0° the reference point for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). All points east of this are denoted with an E and all points west with a W. They join up in the middle of the pacific ocean at longitude 180°

Some websites use a decimal representation of Latitude and Longitude. i.e 55.5856 or similar

The Ordinance Survey Grid Reference system provides a scale independent method of pin pointing every position in the UK, and has been printed on ordinance survey maps since the 1940's. Example TG 073386

The first two letters specify a single grid square; the first narrows it down to a 500km square, and the second to a 100 km square. This system uses 6 figure grid references to pinpoint a location to within 100 meters. The first three figures provide an easting (073) and the second three the northing (386). The first two digits of each pair define a specific grid line on the map and where they cross a grid point (07,38). The last digits of each pair together represent an imaginary point north and east of this grid point.

The British National Grid system identifies every point in the UK as an offset from a datum point just south west of the Scilly isles in meters. Example E608060 N338640 Easting and Northing figures represent an cartesian offset point.