What's New?

As we release new data enhancements and service improvements for the OS NGD, we will update this page to provide you with a high-level summary of what's launched.

2025 OS NGD enhancements

March 2025 – OS NGD data enhancements

Highlights of the OS NGD data enhancements released to customers in March 2025.

Highlights of the OS NGD data enhancements released to customers in March 2025:

Buildings

• New Building Access Location Feature Type added to the Building Features Collection. Building Access Location features identify access points to key public buildings for vehicles and pedestrians, enhancing urban planning, emergency response, and accessibility.

• New attribution provided for Buildings:

  • Roof Shape: Identifies the predominant geometric shape of a building's roof, aiding in visualisation and architectural analysis.

  • Roof Aspect: Provides information on the orientation of a roof, which is useful for solar energy planning and environmental studies.

  • Green Roof Presence: Indicates whether a building has a green roof, supporting sustainability and urban greening initiatives.

  • Solar Panel Presence: Shows if solar panels are installed on a building's roof, helping in renewable energy assessments and planning.

  • Roof Material: Details the type of predominant material used for a roof, which is important for construction, maintenance, and environmental impact studies.

  • Building Height: A comprehensive set of five attributes detailing the heights of various parts of a building, including both absolute and relative measurements. This enhancement supports urban planning and Emergency Services.

• These buildings enhancements aim to improve visualisation, urban development planning, emergency response, and sustainability initiatives. More information on the March 2025 buildings enhancements is available from the OS NGD Buildings pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

Examples of building features and attributes provided by the OS NGD Buildings and OS NGD Land Use Themes.

Example visualisation showing the primary roof material present on buildings. A background map has been included for context.

Geographical Names

• New Crowd Sourced Name Point Feature Type added to the OS NGD Named Features Collection, which includes names submitted by expert third parties via the Vernacular Names Tool in the OS Data Hub. Where possible, the crowd sourced names are linked to other OS NGD features, allowing the use of both official and colloquial names together.

Example of a Crowd Sourced Name Point feature being matched to existing OS NGD (Building Part and Address) features via its OSID (OS Identifier) and UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number). A background map has been included to provide context.

Land Use

• Three new types of site added to Land Use Sites descriptions: Beach, Military Training Area, and Wind Farm. Over 2 600 new sites have been added to the dataset for this enhancement (1 927 beaches, 90 Military Training Areas and 604 Wind Farms). These are sites that may not be spatially coincident with existing topographic areas (i.e. they may not align with topographic features like field boundaries), unlike other types of site. Beaches will include Site Access Locations with attribution that highlights the nearest public Road Node and the direct distance to that node from the access point on the edge of the beach feature. Military Training Areas and Wind Farms will not include Site Access Locations.

Example of a Land Use Site featuring a description of 'Beach' with Pedestrian and Vehicular Access Locations shown. Background maps are included for context.

• An Access Purpose attribute has been added to Site Access Location features for key public sites to identify what the Site Access Location is being used for (Primary Public, Public, Private, or Emergency). The new data will enhance and support situational awareness for emergency responses, hazard planning, and policing operations at key public sites; the data will also support travel modelling and make it easier to assess accessibility to services for the public.

Example of the four types of Access Purpose points within a football stadium for purposes of emergency response and evacuations. A background map has been included to provide context.

Structures

• The addition of nine different types of tunnel to the Compound Structure Feature Type. These were added to v2 of the schema on 28 March 2025 and v1 on 09 April 2025.

Transport

• New Street Light Feature Type added to the OS NGD Transport Features Collection to identify the location of pole-mounted street lights and provide a reference to the nearest Road Link or Path Link. This is the first consistent GB-wide dataset of street lights that is updated monthly and maintained to defined quality levels.
• New attribution supplied against the Road Link and Path Link Feature Types to indicate how well-lit they are. The new data will support the identification of safe routes for active travel use cases .

Visualisation showing Street Light coverage on Road Links and Path Links and how well-lit they are (using the Presence of Street Light Coverage attribute).

2024 OS NGD enhancements

September 2024 – OS NGD data enhancements

Buildings

• New number of floors attribution added to Building features to identify the maximum number of occupiable floors at or above ground level within a residential or office building. Over 23.5 million office or residential buildings in Great Britain now have a number of floors value, and a total of nearly 47 million floors have been added to the OS NGD. Among other uses, the new attribution will provide emergency services with more information when responding to real-time incidents, such as a fire in a high-rise building, and will help support insurers to improve their risk profiling and underwriting.

Land Use – Enhanced land use attribution, increased coverage for Sites, and more Site Access Location points

• New land use attribution will be provided for the OS NGD ‘Features’ Collections for Buildings, Land, Land Use, Structures, Transport and Water. The new attribution maps the OS land use classifications to the National Land Use Database (NLUD) schema and the land use information derived from OS Addressing. The new attribution helps to give more detail about what is contained within a Site – for example, the total number of addresses contained within a single Site and what number of those addresses are defined as commercial, residential, or other.

• Greater coverage for land use Sites, particularly non-residential sites, with over 1.5 million Sites added to the OS NGD gradually over the last two years. This has brought the total number of Sites contained within the OS NGD to 26 million.
• An additional 180 000 Site Access Location points have been added to the OS NGD. These features show where vehicles and / or pedestrians can access Sites and, among other uses, help the emergency services to identify the most efficient routes for reaching an incident.

Structures

• Additional bridge interaction attribution added to Compound Structure features to identify the type of network (road, path, railway, canal, water or multiple) passing over and / or under bridges. Over 660 000 bridge interactions have been added to the OS NGD.

March 2024 – OS NGD data enhancements

Buildings

• New attribution provided for Buildings:

  • Building Age: The age of the main building in a site, created using Verisk data and OS data​.

  • Construction Material: The primary construction material of the building, created using Verisk data and OS data​.

  • Basement Presence: An indicator to show whether a basement or a self-contained basement flat are present at the building, created using Verisk data and OS data​.

  • Building Description: A new description attribute to describe the nature of the building, derived from its use and relation to surrounding buildings,​ created using OS data​.

• More information on the buildings enhancements is available from the OS NGD Buildings pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

Land cover – Enhanced land cover attribution

• Enhanced land cover attribution to ‘natural’ topographic area features across the OS NGD ‘Features’ Collections for Land, Structures, Transport and Water.

• Improved consistency and accuracy for specific land features by reducing the minimum capture size criteria in rural and moorland geographies.

• Mapping OS land cover classification to recognised habitat classification schemes (EUNIS and UK BAP Broad Habitats) in a new cross reference table.

• Assigning a percentage cover value to topographic areas in a new cross reference table.

• More information on the land cover enhancements is available from the OS NGD Land cover enhancements pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

Structures – Field Boundary

• New Field Boundary Feature Type added to the Structure Features Collection to identify the location, nature and properties of a field boundary in rural and moorland areas.
• Height and width values provided for vegetated field boundary features.

• More information on this enhancement is available from the Field Boundary pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

Transport

• New Tram On Road​ Feature Type added to the Transport Network Collection to locate where trams are present against the OS road network.
• Tram track attribution added indicating the presence of tram tracks on a road​. Supplied as new attribution against Road Link features​.
• More information on these enhancements is available from the OS NGD Transport pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

Geographical Names

• New Named Road Junction Feature Type added to the OS NGD Named Features Collection, which provides enhanced names and the numbers of junctions. Includes both intersects without an official name or number and officially named or numbered junctions.

2023 OS NGD enhancements

September 2023 – OS NGD data enhancements

Buildings

• New Building Feature Type added to the OS NGD Building Features Collection.

  • Attribution provided on a building's use, how it is connected to other buildings, additional details on addresses contained within a building, and whether a building is considered to be the main one within a site.

  • Cross references added between the new Building Feature Type and the Building Part, Site, and Built Address Feature Types.

Transport

• New rail feature types added to the OS NGD Transport Network Collection, giving information about the topologically connected rail network:

  • Railway Link
  • Railway Link Set
  • Railway Node
• Available rail network attribution now includes track representation (single / multitrack, siding) and use (freight / passenger / mixed).

• New Pavement Link Feature Type added to the OS NGD Transport Network Collection, giving information on the presence of pavements on the Road Network. More information on this enhancement is available from the OS NGD Transport pages in the Using OS NGD Data section.
• New attribution added to the Road Link Feature Type, giving details about pavement presence: left or right side of road, coverage, and minimum and average width. More information on this enhancement is available from the OS NGD Transport pages in the 'Using OS NGD Data' section.

August 2023 – OS NGD data enhancements

Transport

• Path network coverage extended to all of Great Britain (it was previously just available for urban areas). The road and path networks have been topologically structured together, which has increased the number of features present in the Paths feature types (i.e. Path, Path Link, Path Node, Connecting Link, and Connecting Node Feature Types).

March 2023 – OS NGD access enhancements

APIs

• Launch of the new vector tiles API: OS NGD API – Tiles.

OS Select+Build

• Option to select which data schema version you want to access for certain address feature types (see the Addressing 'Versioning information' page and the 'Data schema versioning' page for more information).

• Ability to select a preference for the coordinate reference system you receive your OS NGD data in (see the 'Downloading with OS Select+Build' page and 'Coordinate reference systems' page for more details).

• New ability to share your created recipes with other organisations so that they can use exactly the same selections as you (see the 'Downloading with OS Select+Build' page for more details).

• A new 'Order Summary' file will now be provided with your data packages to aid data validation when loading and using OS NGD data.

• Enhanced search capability now available in both the Recipe Builder and your OS Select+Build Recipe Library, helping you locate feature types and your existing recipes quicker than before.

March 2023 – OS NGD data enhancements

Address

• New attributes added to existing address feature types and improvements made for addressing floor-level information as part of the release of data schema version 2.0 (see the Addressing 'Versioning information' page for more information).
• Improvements made to address data regarding the consistency of address positioning, usage classifications, business names and lifecycle.

Transport

• New Average and Indicative Speed Feature Type added to the OS NGD RAMI Collection, giving full Great Britain coverage for speed data.
• Speed data is now included in the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), so it is free for PSGA Members for the first time.

• Increased number of daily time periods now available for average speed data.

• COUs (change-only updates) available for speed data for the first time.

• Improved completeness of the Road Width attribute in the Road Link Feature Type, which extends coverage for road width data from just urban areas to urban areas, rural areas and mountain and moorland areas.

Water

• Two new feature types added to the OS NGD Water Features Collection:

  • Waterbody Catchment Feature Type
  • River Basin District Catchment Feature Type

OS NGD delivery roadmap for 2025 and 2026

The OS NGD delivery roadmap (as of March 2025) can be seen in the following image; the roadmap details what was delivered in the March 2025 data enhancements release and what is planned for delivery in the upcoming September 2025 and March 2026 data enhancements releases:

OS NGD delivery roadmap (as of March 2025)

In the future, we plan to deliver over 15 data enhancements to the OS NGD. As we design and develop these data enhancements, more details will be added to the 'Future OS NGD Data Enhancements' page.