London: Path-Traced 3D City Map · Framed Matte Poster

Every building in this map is real. Britain publishes no open 3D city model, so these roofs were reconstructed the honest way: the Environment Agency's 2022 national LiDAR survey, a one-metre laser scan flown over the whole country, read inside each building's true footprint to recover the roof surface it actually has. Checked against independently recorded heights the reconstruction lands within a tenth of a metre — One Blackfriars measures 163.6 m here against its recorded 163. The light is not a filter: the whole city was path traced, the same technique film studios use, with the shadows computed ray by ray from a sun standing 60° above the horizon.

The Thames swings through the lower half of the disc and organises everything around it. Westminster and Whitehall on the north bank, the South Bank's slabs opposite, St James's Park and its lake cut into the west. This is the widest range of building heights in the series — one roof in seven stands above 32 metres — so the towers throw long, and the Georgian terraces between them barely throw at all. Every block casts the shadow its true height earns.

Printed on museum-quality matte paper in an Ayous wood frame.

Details

• 2 km radius around Charing Cross · 51.5080° N, 0.1180° W · EPSG:32630
• Buildings: reconstructed from Environment Agency 2022 LiDAR (OGL v3) © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2022
• Terrain: EA LIDAR Composite DTM 1 m · Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors
• Path-traced global illumination — real computed shadows, not hillshade
• Museum-quality matte paper, Ayous wood frame