Great Britain in relief: open LiDAR maps to download

A shaded relief map of the whole of Great Britain, built from the same open LiDAR terrain models that drive LiDAR Lens. It comes as ready-made images, as an interactive map that exports framed and credited images, and as base-map tiles for web maps. A second version lays BGS bedrock geology over the relief. Everything is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

Great Britain, shaded relief, 700 m grid, British National Grid. Click for the 3500 px version.

Downloads

Version	1000 px 700 m grid	3500 px 200 m grid	7000 px 100 m grid
Relief	JPG	JPG · PNG	JPG · PNG
Grey hillshade	JPG	JPG · PNG	JPG · PNG
Elevation tint	JPG	JPG · PNG	JPG · PNG
Bedrock geology	JPG	JPG · PNG	JPG · PNG

The 7000 px versions print at about A1 (200 dpi) or A2 (300 dpi). Vertical exaggeration is 3.5×, 3× and 2.5× from the smallest size to the largest, enough to keep lowland scarps visible at each scale. Title, scale bar and data credits are printed on every image.

Bedrock geology (BGS Geology 625k) by period, on shaded relief. Igneous intrusions are coloured by composition.

Make your own map

The interactive map uses the same data and rendering. It offers four styles (relief, grey hillshade, elevation tint, geology) and four colour schemes, with a multi-directional or single sun, adjustable sun direction and height, and adjustable vertical exaggeration. Inland water can be switched on or off. Any frame can be exported, as on screen or in A-series, square or 16:9, at up to 7200 px, with an editable title and the required credits. Tapping the map gives the grid reference, height and, in geology mode, the bedrock period. A link opens the same spot in LiDAR Lens at full 1 m resolution.

For web maps

Web Mercator tiles (zoom 5 to 11, transparent sea) are available in relief, grey and geology versions for Leaflet, MapLibre or OpenLayers:

<script src="https://timdaw37.github.io/gb-relief/gbrelief.js"></script>
GBRelief.layer('relief').addTo(map);   // or 'grey', 'geology'

Template: https://timdaw37.github.io/gb-relief/tiles/{style}/{z}/{x}/{y}.webp. Full details are in the repository.

Data and method

Terrain. The terrain comes from 1 m open LiDAR digital terrain models. England is covered by the Environment Agency LiDAR Composite DTM. Wales is covered by the Welsh Government LiDAR DTM, via DataMapWales. Scotland is covered by Scottish Government, SEPA, HES and OIC LiDAR, via the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal. The data were resampled to about 90 m and reprojected to the British National Grid at 100 m. Parts of the Highlands and Islands and the Isle of Man have no open LiDAR. There the terrain is GEM-15 v1, Google's experimental 15 m bare-earth model (Batchu et al. 2026). Against the Scottish LiDAR its median per-tile offset is −0.09 m, so the two join without a visible step at this scale.

Coast and water. The Environment Agency composite includes LiDAR returns over the sea and in estuaries, at about −4 to +2 m. Left in, they produce false land, such as a strip joining Lundy to the Devon coast. Land is therefore clipped to mean high water using OS Open Zoomstack, which also supplies inland water bodies and foreshore.

Shading. Slopes are taken from central differences. The light is a weighted four-direction sun: 315° at weight 0.5, 270° and 0° at 0.2 each, and 225° at 0.1, all at 40° elevation. This brings out ridges and scarps that run north-west to south-east, parallel to the main light, which a single north-west light leaves flat. The elevation tint runs from green lowland to brown upland, with pale summits above 1100 m.

Geology. The bedrock is BGS Geology 625k (DiGMapGB-625), coloured by period with the International Commission on Stratigraphy chart colours. Felsic and mafic intrusions are shown separately. At 1:625,000 the geological boundaries are generalised and coarser than the relief beneath them.

Resolution. At these scales the 1 m LiDAR adds little beyond consistency and the absence of interpolation artefacts. A national relief map at 100 m built from OS Terrain 50 would differ little. The LiDAR matters at field scale, which is what LiDAR Lens shows.

Licence and credit

The maps and tiles are free to use under CC BY 4.0. Credit "GB Relief, Tim Daw (sarsen.org)" and keep the data credits:

LiDAR DTMs: Environment Agency (England); Welsh Government, DataMapWales (Wales); Scottish Government, SEPA, HES, OIC, Scottish Remote Sensing Portal (Scotland). Open Government Licence v3.0. GEM-15 v1 (experimental), produced by Google, CC BY 4.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Geology versions: contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI, Open Government Licence v3.0.

Batchu, V.V., Neumann, M., Li, T., Allen, B., Zhang, J. and Van Arsdale, C. 2026. GEM-15: Global surface and terrain elevation models (15 meters) from sub-meter optical stereo imagery. EarthArXiv preprint, not peer reviewed. doi:10.31223/X55N75.