How a Stadium Heritage piece is made, in detail.

The Ordnance Survey, applied to sport.

The Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791 to map the United Kingdom for military purposes — specifically, in response to the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland. Two and a half centuries later, the Survey’s MasterMap data underpins the United Kingdom’s emergency services, planning system, infrastructure programmes, and most serious geographic publishing. It is the most authoritative cartographic record of British geography in existence.

Stadium Heritage is built on this data. Every piece begins with an Ordnance Survey MasterMap tile of the area surrounding a stadium, ground, or court — the same tile that an architect or a transport planner would use, with no licence concession or standard relaxed. The street network is real. The building footprints are real. The land surveys, the boundary marks, the named institutions that surround a sporting venue — the school, the chapel, the railway station, the park — are all preserved, because they are part of the venue’s context and they belong on the map.

The studio’s editorial intervention sits on top of this base. The streets are renamed. The 3D model of the stadium is added. The cartouche, the boundary marks, the grid references, and the title block are all set in the conventions of an Ordnance Survey publication. What you read on a Stadium Heritage piece is, in every other respect, what you would read on any serious cartographic record.

The player-as-road mechanic.

The streets surrounding a venue are renamed for the players who have represented that club. The naming follows the cartographic style of the Ordnance Survey: number, name, country code in parentheses where relevant, and (for trophy editions) the player’s competitive appearance count alongside.

The length of each road is proportional to the player’s appearances in the relevant competition. A first-team debutant occupies the smallest street. A long-serving captain can run across several junctions. The longest streets belong to the players who defined the era. The map can therefore be read at a glance — not as a list of names, but as a visual record of who carried the club through the period in question.

The convention adapts to the sport. For tennis, road length is proportional to Singles Championships held; the longest streets belong to Federer, Djokovic, Navratilova, and Williams. For trophy editions, road length is proportional to minutes played in the competition that won the trophy — not career totals. For rugby and cricket, the convention is calibrated to each sport’s competitive structure.

The 3D model.

A scale 3D-printed model of the stadium is hand-placed on the map in the building’s true geographic footprint. The model is not decorative; it is geographically correct. It sits where the stadium sits.

Models are produced in batches and finished by the studio. For most pieces, the box frame depth is 45mm — sufficient to accommodate the print, the model, and the air gap that protects the model surface. New Wembley Stadium is a single exception: its arch is exceptionally tall, and a 75mm-deep box frame is used to accommodate it correctly. Pieces mapping Wembley therefore carry a slightly different visual presence in the box, by design.

The dating convention.

Every piece is dated to a specific moment. The revision date is set in the lower-right cartouche of the map, in the manner of an Ordnance Survey survey period. The date does not refer to the day the piece was printed or framed; it refers to the moment the map records.

For football transfer-window editions, the date is the close of the relevant transfer window. For tennis Championships editions, it is the fortnight of the tournament. For trophy editions, it is the date the trophy was won — or, in the case of league titles, the date the title was clinched. The map is therefore not a record of an instant, but of an edition of the season — a stable cartographic statement of who was at the club, what they had done, and where the moment had landed by the date in the cartouche.

Materials and finishing.

The print is a Giclée on Ilford Cotton Textured paper — an archival 100% cotton stock, pH-neutral, designed for fine-art reproduction and rated for 200+ years of lightfast life when displayed properly. The paper has a faint texture that holds the OS line work crisply and reads as substantial in the hand.

The frame is a museum-grade box frame, oak or hand-painted, with UV-protective glazing. The depth is 45mm or 75mm depending on the model. The piece is glazed, sealed, and packaged in protective wrap with a hand-finished interior insert; the certificate of authenticity travels in a separate envelope.

The certificate, the edition, the inheritance.

Every piece is accompanied by an A5 folded Certificate of Authenticity, signed and numbered in ink by the cartographer. The certificate carries the piece’s methodology, its edition number (“__ of 75”), and the date of release.

The back of the certificate carries an Inheritance Record — four ruled lines for successive owners. The piece is intended to be passed on, and the record is intended to travel with it. A Stadium Heritage piece is not a transaction; it is a record that becomes part of a household, a club, an institution, and is meant to remain meaningful for the lifetimes of multiple owners.

What this is not.

This is not licensed merchandise. It is not a fan-craft brand. It is not produced on a generic map base, not built from open-source data, not printed on commodity stock, and not framed by a high-street picture framer. None of those routes can produce a piece of cartography that holds up to inspection by a person who knows what they are looking at, and none of those routes is the one Stadium Heritage takes.

OS MasterMap licences are available to qualified businesses. The cartographic and editorial work that turns OS data into a finished piece is what distinguishes the studio: the methodology of player-as-road, the discipline of which venue to map for which trophy, the conventions of the OS cartouche applied to a sporting subject. These are skills that take years of practice to develop. They are why a Stadium Heritage piece is a piece of cartography first and a piece of sports memorabilia second.