About MapTools.uk

MapTools.uk is a collection of free mapping tools built for people in the UK. Every tool on the site is designed to solve a specific, practical problem, whether that's planning a delivery route, checking flood risk before buying a house, or finding the nearest public toilet. The site draws on 7 government and open data sources, covering over 14,000 toilet locations, 20,000+ schools with Ofsted ratings, 8,000+ fuel stations, and hundreds of thousands of food hygiene inspections.

Why We Built This

Most mapping tools online are either locked behind sign-ups, limited by daily usage caps, or designed for a US audience. We wanted something different. MapTools.uk is built from the ground up for UK postcodes, UK data, and UK users. All our mapping tools are free with no limits. For professional delivery drivers, we also offer Route Planner Pro - a £5/month upgrade with real road-distance routing and stop-by-stop navigation.

The site is funded by advertising, which means we can keep everything free without asking for your email address or credit card details.

What We Offer

The site currently has 12 tools, each focused on a different mapping task:

• Route Optimiser - Paste a list of postcodes and get the fastest order to visit them all. Used by delivery drivers, couriers, and field engineers across the UK.
• Radius Map - Draw circles on a map to visualise catchment areas, delivery zones, or travel distances. Upload a CSV to see which locations fall inside or outside.
• Measure Distance and Distance Between - Measure routes by clicking on a map, or get the straight-line distance between two places.
• Area Calculator - Draw shapes on a map and get the area in square metres, hectares, or acres.
• Nearest Postcodes - Find the closest postcodes to any UK location, ranked by distance.
• Flood Risk Checker - Look up the Environment Agency's flood risk rating for any postcode.
• Crime Checker - See recent crime data from Police.uk for any area in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
• School Finder - Find nearby schools with Ofsted ratings and SATs/GCSE results from the Department for Education.
• Fuel Prices - Compare petrol and diesel prices at stations near you using government open data.
• Food Hygiene Checker - Check food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency for restaurants and takeaways.
• Toilet Finder - Locate public toilets nearby, with filters for accessibility, baby changing, and free entry.

Where Our Data Comes From

We use official, publicly available datasets wherever possible. This includes:

• Maps and geocoding - OpenStreetMap via Nominatim
• Crime statistics - Police.uk open data (England, Wales, and Northern Ireland)
• Flood risk - Environment Agency "Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea" dataset
• Schools and results - Department for Education's Get Information About Schools (GIAS) and school performance tables
• Food hygiene ratings - Food Standards Agency (FSA) open data API
• Fuel prices - Government fuel price transparency initiative (LADR open data)
• Public toilets - Great British Public Toilet Map community dataset
• UK postcodes - Ordnance Survey open data, processed into per-outcode lookup files

We update these datasets regularly. Fuel prices are refreshed daily, crime data is updated monthly, and school data is updated each academic year. For details on how each dataset is processed and how often it refreshes, see our Data Sources page.

Last updated: February 2026

Privacy First

Almost everything on MapTools.uk runs in your browser. When you enter a postcode, your route, or your location, that data is processed locally on your device. It is not sent to our servers and we do not store it.

The only exception is our geocoding proxy, which forwards search queries to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service. This is required by Nominatim's usage policy so we can set proper request headers. We do not log these queries.

We use Google Analytics to understand which tools are popular and Google AdSense to fund the site. Both are covered in our Privacy Policy. We do not sell data and we do not build user profiles.

How It's Built

MapTools.uk is a static website. There is no database, no user accounts system, and no backend application server. The site is built with Astro and uses Leaflet for interactive maps. All tool logic is written in plain JavaScript that runs in your browser.

The static data files (postcodes, school data, toilet locations, flood risk ratings) are pre-processed from their original sources and served as JSON files. This means the tools load quickly and work reliably without depending on third-party APIs being available at the time you use them.

Who Built This

MapTools.uk is built and maintained by Dan, a UK-based developer. The site started in 2025 as a side project to create genuinely useful, privacy-respecting mapping tools that work well with UK postcodes and government data. Every tool is designed, coded, and tested by hand - this is not an auto-generated directory site.

Get in Touch

If you have feedback, a bug report, or a suggestion for a new tool, we would genuinely like to hear from you. Visit our contact page to send us a message. We typically reply within two business days.

You can also browse our tools page to explore everything we offer.