Marina Listing Map
Your choice of marina is so important. You can find out what you need to know here. There are over one hundred narrowboat friendly marinas in England and Wales with more and more opening for business.
Location is a majot consideration for your narrowboat’s home. You need to find one that’s reasonably easy to get to from your home (if you decide not to live on boat full time) and you need to find one that is central to the area of the canal network you want to explore.
That’s where the lovely people at Google have come in very handy.
The interactive map below lists every one of the narrowboat friendly marinas in the UK that I have identified so far. Just click on the icon to read a brief description of the marina in question then, if you want to find out more, click on the link to the marina’s own review page.
You can look at the location in a number of different ways. There are four labels at the top right of the map – “Map”, “Sat”, “Ter” and “Earth”. Clicking on Map will show you a regular map of the location. You can zoom in or out, or move left, right, up and down by using the buttons at the top left hand corner. If you click on Sat, you will see an aerial photograph of the area. You can use the same controls to zoom into your chosen marina on the photograph too.
Please note that Google’s aerial photographs may be three or four years out of date so if you are looking for a recently built marina, you may only see a photograph of a farmer’s field.
If you want to get even closer to the ground, you can. You can use Google’s Street View. Google has spent millions of pounds sending high tech vehicles along every road in the country to photograph them. And you can use their service free of charg.
Here’s how you do it. At the bottom left hand corner of the map below is a link “View Marina Listing in a larger map”. Click on this link to take you to the larger map. You will see the same map as below but you will have a little more control. You will see a slider on the left of the map with an orange “Jelly Baby” man at the top. Zoom in to your chosen marina as you did before then, when you can see the marina in reasonable detail drag the little fellow close to the marina. Any roads that have been photographed by Google will be outlined in blue. Drop the man onto a blue-lined road close to the marina to get a view from the ground. It’s amazing how much you can see.
View Marina Listing in a larger map
Note that some marinas have private access roads so Google will not have photographed them. This is actually quite a helpful indication of how quiet the marina is likely to be. If you have Google photographed views all around the marina, it means that there’s likely to be quite a bit of trafic (noise).
Enjoy play time with Google!