Shaun in the City

A fan of Shaun the Sheep? Well, you are going to be seeing plenty of him in London over the next couple of months. On Saturday, 50 fibreglass Shaun the Sheep statues will be placed in various locations in central London – for “Shaun in the City”. 45 of the 50 are featured on the map above (click it for a larger version). The map shows four trails of 3-5km where you can visit several in quick succession. Each statue is painted differently – from a solid gold-painted one in Canary Wharf, to one dressed as a beefeater. Above is part of the official map and there is also a full list of the designs. Some of the sheep, marked with a diamond, are indoors.

In late May, the exhibition packs up for a move to Bristol, and then in the autumn they’ll all be back in Covent Garden for a weekend, to be auctioned off. If this all sounds a little familiar, it follows on from Cow Parade, Elephant Parade, a set of kangaroos, Gromits (in Bristol), giant books and miniature Boris Buses, the last of which have just had their closing auction.

We like the official map which we have reproduced above. It’s an attractive, green-tinted custom-made map from OpenStreetMap data, with vignettes of key tourist sites in central London, and largely clutter-free, with just the key streets and tube and railway stations named, as well as the walking routes and the sheep locations themselves. The cartographer has taken care to curve names on wiggly streets, and add a watercolour effect to soften some of the lines. It’s great seeing attractive, boutique maps like this created for these sorts of events, which will be hugely popular with Londoners and tourists alike, and also great a great use of the OpenStreetMap dataset that contributors in London have carefully customised over the years. Now I can go and hunt Shauns on a map I helped create!

Map obtained from the Shaun in the City website. There is also an iPhone and Android map.