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  • “Work experience” – and a shared love of maps!

    A blog by Tom, Founder and Director

    We had the great fortune to work with the incredibly talented Enolà Le Basle, a PhD researcher at the University of Leicester, for a fortnight this autumn.

    Organised through CENTA (the Central England NERC Training Alliance – a PhD training partnership across Universities in the Midlands)’s excellent work placement scheme, we were able to involve her in three exciting projects that, until this placement, had been on the back burner.

    The first project was a creative endeavour that feeds into a major part of our medium-term business plan. Informally dubbed ‘FTLOM Studio 1’, our goal was to build gradients in colour, pattern and texture along landscapes and ecotones. To do this, we got to enjoy our founder Tom’s native west Penwith under a warm sun. We hiked clifftops, wandered dunes, jogged between waves in the intertidal – and captured 3D models everywhere.

    The fact that we saw breaching tuna, leaping dolphins, diving gannets and a few peregrine falcons is a ridiculous bonus. Some weeks, life just puts on its best show! 😅

    A bluefin tuna doing its best impression of a bottlenose dolphin. We spent half an hour watching a few of these decimate a bait ball just off Land’s End!

    The second project feeds into a residential field trip For The Love Of Mapping will support next spring. We spent the best part of a week on the Jurassic Coast, looking for visible signs of recent – and, scarily, imminent – cliff collapse and coastal erosion. It’s fair to say we found both. Might have found a few fossils, too!

    Big thanks to Jennings & Cooke, once again, for very generously gifting us some Trimble RTK GNSS kit. Hugely useful and we’re humbled by their kindness.

    Finally, we worked on internal capability and product development. Basically, building 3D workflows and designing products. Enolà led on the latter and we’re very impressed indeed. Whilst today we’re a scientific/GIS consultancy and training house, our plans extend into the creative and consumer spaces. Don’t think we would have half the ideas we’ve got in our sketchbook without Enolà’s support, so we’re very grateful.

    I found these work placements fantastic as a CENTA PhD researcher myself. Now, sat on the other side of the desk, I see they’re excellent for business too. Highly recommended!

    Thank you, CENTA – and thank you, Enolà!

    Team photo at the ‘dynamic’ (to say the least…) Jurassic Coast, Lyme Regis, UK

  • Finding treasure in the Lakes

    August was a fun month as we designed, prepped and delivered our very first public-facing event: a treasure hunt!

    Last year, I attended the gorgeous ‘Krankenhaus Festival’ in the western Lake District. Organised by the band Sea Power and their friends, it’s a wondrous mix of live music, comedy, nature hikes, talks and much more. I was a volunteer, invited to tail-walk hikes along the coast and into the fells. Loved every second.

    It’s held in the truly delightful grounds of Muncaster Castle. Think historic buildings, forests, landscaped gardens and so on. They’ve also got hawks, owls and vultures – and axe throwing, archery and other medieval-themed activities too. Truly a diverse place for a cultural highlight.

    It sowed a seed and I was invited to return this year to volunteer again. I didn’t give it a second thought. It also made me think: what else could I bring with me? What would make 2026 even more fun than 2025?

    Well… Maps. Obviously!

    After a few weeks umming and ahhing, I pitched the idea of a treasure hunt. To my delight, the idea was well-received. Fast forward to September and I can say it was a success. Phew.

    It looks even better in full-colour. Getting the woodland to look ‘just right’ was a big challenge. I’m a perfectionist, and I don’t love it. Still, it’s more than good enough!



    Inspired by flora and fauna found across the festival site, I developed a bespoke map. I wanted to fuse realism with a little whimsy. This was a lot more complex than it seemed. Realism was the easy bit – getting LiDAR tiles, rendering hillshades and so on. Digitising buildings and paths wasn’t awful, either.

    Creating whimsy, though? Gosh, what a challenge. It’s subjective at the best of times. I can’t even describe what ‘whimsy’, for me, means. I guess I wanted something that worked, spatially, but was a long way away from consultancy-type deliverables. Something a bit more fun. A map that would exercise my creative mind for a change.

    A black-and-white demo map demonstrating how bloody well my waterproofing strategy performed. Just as well as it was very, very, very wet all weekend!



    I’ll spare you the details. Just know that it ultimately landed well 😅

    It was pure joy seeing a couple of families wandering the site with my ‘treasure hunt’ entry cards as I sought a morning coffee. It was a relief, a reward and a joy to know I also have multiple winners. People actually completed my hunt. Amazing. I might even give myself a pat on the back.

    It was great great fun to develop and, apparently, good challenging fun for treasure hunters too. It’s also catalysed my long-shelved plans to run events regularly.

    Now that feels like finding a pot of once buried gold!

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  • There’s no business like… GEO Business?

    This year, For The Love Of Mapping attended the GEO Business Show.

    It was my first since my PhD days (and my first industry event since my comprehensive mental breakdown a couple of years ago 😅 The less said about that, the better).

    As it had been so long – probably 7 or 8 years – I thought I’d better dip a toe back in and see what’s what. Plus things had moved from the lively Angel to the more, uhh, brutal environs of Custom House.

    Keeping that ‘novelty’ theme going, I also invited Nick (co-founder and business development lead) along.

    As ever, it was a real joy being able to catch up with old faces, and a privilege to make so many new connections too. It’s fair to say the industry has changed substantially in recent years. However, it remains full of inspirational people at all levels and across the private and public sectors alike.

    There’s a saying, isn’t there – ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’? Well, I guess that the show was full of ‘competitors’ and it’s certainly helped me clarify where I want to position my businesses. It’s also validated a few assumptions I’d made, which is fantastic.

    I also sensed a bit of an undercurrent of uncertainty. We’re in febrile times geopolitically and economically. There seemed to be more hesitance in terms of pushing boundaries. Lots of variations on the same few themes, too. As a chap who wrote a PhD suggesting SLAM might revolutionise a couple of industries some years ago, I feel mildly smug, too.

    For me, getting out to shows like this is a bit of a gamble. I don’t have a gadget to show off or a widget to plug. I don’t have a budget to buy them, either. I’m essentially selling insight, clarity of thought and a strategic mindset. So I rock up and do my best to listen. And listen I did.

    To those I caught up with, cheers again.

    To those I missed, chat over a coffee?

    Those of you wanting a bit of support in uncertainty, I know a guy who keeps on finding himself at the same table. The one marked “what might be the next thing?”. Perhaps give me a shout if you’d like answers.

    You won’t be the first, and you won’t want to be last!

  • In the field

    This week I’m in the Cotswolds with CENTA (Central England NERC Training Alliance) and For The Love Of Mapping for the annual ‘Field TRiPP’.

    It’s a week-long residential in which first year researchers get to immerse themselves in policy and environmental science, while also building bonds with their peers. I’m leading a group of enthusiastic PhD researchers exploring sustainability in a very local context.

    Based at the Sustain Farm Shop and Cafe in Royal Wootton Bassett for the day, we heard from Nick Ash (Sustain Wiltshire), John Turton and Tim Payne (Sustain Cotswolds). Both community interest companies (CIC), they demonstrated the ways in which they’re taking immediate and impactful action – despite the slooooow pace of bureaucracy.

    We’ve toured a pretty impressive concept at a local landfill site which will use methane emissions to power, heat and inflate innovative ‘super-midden’ plant growth domes.

    We’ve also had a glimpse of ‘better’ – ideas that work, today, for communities as well as business. This included great insight from Umesh Kathirvel at stepzero.eco on the platform he and his team have built for SMEs looking to become more sustainable.

    Today, my group are putting together a video showcasing everything we’ve seen and heard. Can’t wait to see it!

    It’s a lot fun and genuinely quite inspirational. No matter how bleak the headlines, there’s always hope.

    Hope – and the power of community. Cracking stuff.

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  • I love what I do…

    …and I love what we do at For The Love Of Mapping!

    My highlight of the week was delivering three days of tailored GIS training to the CENTA (Central England NERC Training Alliance) DTP, supported by Jamie MacManaway (a doctoral researcher based at Loughborough University, and all round good egg).

    It’s been a lot of fun – and a lot more preparation. I’ve enjoyed it all.

    Obviously I like maps and it’s always a joy sharing that passion, but I’ve also relished spending time with PhD researchers after a while away from the lab. If you want a handle on the state of the world, it’s always worth taking the time to talk to those working at the forefront of R&D. Great chats were had, and I left my own training course feeling like I’d learned lots, too.

    Behind the scenes, Nick and I are planning some big things. Naturally, maps are involved. You’ll have to sit tight before I can share much more, though…

    I’ve also held the first interview for a book I’m co-writing, and got the ball rolling on a potential work placement I hope to host this summer. I even managed to find the time to catch-up on those more urgent emails, which is NEVER a sentence I expected to type 🤣

    I’m back in Shrewsbury for a week or two, now, and looking forward to a couple of events at the Croud Meadow and the Abbey, networking with fellow SMEs. You know the score by now: I love getting to know you all and if you fancy a chat over a cuppa, I’m always keen.

    Thanks for reading and, if you celebrate, have a great weekend. Don’t forget to check in with your friendly local cartographer!

    – Tom

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  • A busy start.

    Shrewsbury, UK – the headquarters of FTLOM – at golden hour. Scrubs up well.

    It’s been a very busy and rewarding first few weeks in business. In fact, we’re quietly stunned at just how rapidly the first shoots of the business have unfurled.

    So, what have we been up to? Well, we’ve…

    • Provided some bespoke cartographic design for an agritech specialist, directly contributing to a UK Government-funded business development campaign across Central and South America
    • Developed some infographics and data visualisations for a major name in remote sensing on a project funded by a major UK R&D institution and in partnership with one of the great space agencies
    • Put pen to paper to develop not one, not two, but three specialist training courses for a Doctoral Training Partnership targetting a cohort of PhD researchers
    • Started development of a unique creative map showcasing an entire community of coffee shops in a popular UK town renowned for independent businesses
    • Lit the touch paper for a major project comparing tourism in west Cornwall between 1926 and 2026, drawing from a fantastic piece of written history found at an antiques fair in mid-Wales!
    • Held our first board meeting – on a series of trains orbiting the Heart of Wales line. As you do…

    It’s as good a time as any to wrap things up for 2025 and to wish you a great festive break.

    Catch you next year!

  • We’re in business!

    Welcome to For The Love Of Mapping Limited, and thanks for popping by.

    In autumn 2025, my friend Nick and I set-up For The Love Of Mapping (or ‘FTLOM’) to share our love for maps and mapping. Our goal is quite simply to make excellent maps.

    We offer GIS ‘as a service’, perhaps paired with expertise in cutting edge remote sensing. We also offer eye catching and, from time to time, thought-provoking maps and ‘map art’ you might hang on a wall. As storytellers, we think maps and a sense of place are integral to crafting an engaging tale.

    As scientists and geospatial enthusiasts who love the great outdoors, we’ll also offer training courses and ‘field experiences’ in the very near future. Think: map-making masterclasses, introductions to satellite mapping and days out exploring the coast ahd country.

    It’s been a busy first few weeks, engaging with multiple customers to create maps and deliver graphic design. While we respect our clients discretion, we’re happy to share that we’re working on two international projects focussing on supply chains and, separately, on novel sensor datasets.

    As a freshly-minted business finding our feet, we’ll be tweaking and tinkering with our website. Keep an eye on this page for updates, developments and additions to our core mapmaking offer.

    Cheers!
    Tom

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