LiDAR Lens - the free comprehensive LiDAR viewer for England and Wales

LiDAR Lens is, I think, the best and most complete free LiDAR tool there is for England and Wales. Every square metre of both countries' 1 m LiDAR is there, live, in a lens you drag across the map. You can light it from any angle, exaggerate it, and switch between hillshade, multi-direction hillshade, slope, local relief, sky-view factor, aspect and red relief, until faint banks, ditches, barrows and lost field systems jump out. Click any spot and it tells you the ground's measurements and the recorded sites nearby, with links straight to the records. Old OS maps, aerial photos and modern maps sit underneath for comparison. It works on a phone in the field as well as on a desktop. It costs nothing, there is no login, no account, and no adverts.

How it works

Type a place, postcode or grid reference into the search bar, or tap ◎ Me to go to where you are standing. Drag and resize the lens, and use the sliders for sun angle, exaggeration and contrast. "What’s here?" pins a point, gives its grid reference to copy, and lists nearby records: Historic England in England, and Cadw and Coflein in Wales. The profile tool draws a height section between two clicks, and Share copies a link to the exact view.

Fair use

The LiDAR is fetched live from the Environment Agency and the Welsh Government, through a Cloudflare cache. Each piece is fetched once and shared by everyone, the lens only asks for what is under it, and it backs off if a service is busy. The Environment Agency has confirmed it is happy for the data to be used this way, under its fair use policy.

Please respect landowners, and remember that scheduled monuments are protected by law. Seeing something in the LiDAR is not permission to go and look.

Credits

• LiDAR, England: Environment Agency, Open Government Licence
• LiDAR, Wales: Welsh Government (DataMapWales), Open Government Licence
• Recorded sites, England: Historic England open data, Open Government Licence
• Recorded sites, Wales: Cadw, and the National Monuments Record of Wales (Coflein, RCAHMW), Open Government Licence
• Historic maps: reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, CC-BY
• Background maps: OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA), map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; aerial imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics

The code is open on GitHub. Comments and anything interesting you spot are welcome below.