chch.live the lay of the land

The lay of the land

What the open map records inside the Christchurch City boundary, 642 named features across 11 rolls: the waterways, still water, coast, shore, high places, old sites, stone, waterfront, falls, monuments and the cemeteries. Every record is OpenStreetMap’s (ODbL); a pin is the mapper’s position, not a surveyed mark.

Named features
642
Rolls
11
Suburbs
108
Tracks
1,104

The rolls

The waterways 131 waterways · the Avon, the Heathcote, the Styx and every named stream The still water 28 lakes, wetlands and springs · Te Waihora, Wairewa, the oxbows and the named springs The coast 110 bays and headlands · the harbour’s bays and the peninsula’s capes The shore 21 beaches and islands · the long sands and the harbour’s islands The high places 90 summits and lookouts · the crater rim’s tops and the named viewpoints The old sites 24 ruins and archaeological sites · what stood on the ground before The stone 45 rocks, crags and quarries · the volcanic tors and the pits that built the kerbs The waterfront 12 piers, wharves and jetties · New Brighton’s reach and the harbour’s working piles The falls 11 waterfalls · Hinewai’s cascades and the Brices The monuments 138 memorials and artworks · the marked ground and the remembered names The cemeteries 32 named burial grounds · the quiet ground the open map draws

Read it another way

The suburbs 108 suburbs on the roll, 104 with a drawn outline, each listing what the map records inside it The tracks 1,104 council track records across the city and the hills Heritage walks 31 drawn itineraries through the old ground The moved ground the post-quake survey, suburb by suburb, the east carries the record The big map every layer, live, each family is a pick there too The record, as files every roll’s geojson and json, one shelf

Questions, answered briefly

What does this page count?

642 named features inside the Christchurch City boundary, grouped into 11 rolls by what they are: waterways, lakes, coast, beach, summits, old sites, stone, waterfront, falls, monuments and cemeteries. The count is read off each roll’s own data file at build time.

Where does the geography come from?

OpenStreetMap (ODbL): named features inside the city boundary. A pin is the mapper’s position for a feature, not a surveyed mark, and a listing is a lead, not a register entry. The heritage register is a separate record at /history.

Are the rivers here?

They keep their own roll at /river, 131 waterways drawn, about 609km of channel. The still water is at /lake; between them they are the city’s whole surface water.

Is a feature’s suburb where the pin is?

Yes, a record claims the suburb its pin falls inside. A feature that spans a boundary (Te Waihora runs kilometres) shows the suburb of its mapped centre, which is the honest reading of the pin.

The record behind this

Every roll is OpenStreetMap data inside the Christchurch City boundary (ODbL), fetched through Overpass and baked with the site. The numbers above are read off each family’s own file at build time, they grow as the map grows.

This page as markdown: /geography.md · the files: /data · the suburbs: /suburb.