Every cathedral in the United Kingdom

A map of every building OpenStreetMap knows as a cathedral in the United Kingdom. A cathedral is the church that holds a bishop’s cathedra, his throne; it’s a rank, not a size or a style, which is why the set runs from the great medieval piles (Canterbury, Durham, York, Salisbury) to modest parish-church cathedrals of Victorian dioceses and the immigrant churches’ cathedrals in London. The dots are coloured by denomination, so the map doubles as a picture of how the Christian churches divide up the country.

The points load live from OpenStreetMap, so it’s the full set OSM has, not a hand-picked list. Use the toggles to show or hide a denomination; tap a dot for the name, the denomination, and links to its Wikipedia article and to open it in your phone’s maps app or Google Maps. Tap the ◎ button on the map to drop a pin on your current location and find the cathedrals near you.

Loading cathedrals from OpenStreetMap…

The denominations

Every dot is grouped into one of seven families by its OpenStreetMap denomination tag. In the UK the big two are the established Anglican churches and Rome; the rest are mostly the cathedrals that migration brought, concentrated in London.

• Anglican — the Church of England, the Church in Wales, the Scottish Episcopal Church and (in Northern Ireland) the Church of Ireland: the medieval sees and the great majority of the famous buildings.
• Roman Catholic — the Latin Church in communion with the Pope; almost all its British cathedrals are Victorian or later, built after Catholic emancipation.
• Eastern Orthodox — the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and other autocephalous churches, with cathedrals mostly in London.
• Protestant — the Reformation churches gathered together: Presbyterian and Reformed, plus Methodist, Baptist and the rest.
• Eastern Catholic — Byzantine- and other Eastern-rite churches in communion with Rome.
• Oriental Orthodox — the ancient non-Chalcedonian churches: Armenian Apostolic, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac.
• Other / unspecified — everything else, and any records OSM carries with no denomination tag at all.

How it’s built

One self-contained page, built on free and open tools. MapLibre GL draws the map from Ordnance Survey vector tiles (OS Vector Tile API, proxied by this site’s server so the API key never reaches the browser), and the basemap follows your device’s light or dark mode. OS data covers Great Britain only, so an OpenStreetMap layer sits underneath for Northern Ireland and the map’s edges. The cathedral locations are fetched at load time from the Overpass API, which queries live OpenStreetMap data: here, every object in the United Kingdom tagged building=cathedral. The denomination in each popup comes from that same OpenStreetMap record.

So the map appears instantly, it first draws a saved snapshot that ships with the page (and, on repeat visits, your browser’s cached copy of the last live result), then quietly refreshes from the live Overpass API in the background and swaps in anything that’s changed. If the live service is busy or unreachable, you still get the full snapshot rather than a blank map.

A caveat on the data

The locations come from OpenStreetMap, which is community-maintained: a cathedral that was recently consecrated, deconsecrated or renamed may be missing or stale, a few points can be slightly off, and the denomination tag is uneven: some churches called “cathedral” in their own tradition are tagged differently or not at all, and former cathedrals now used otherwise may linger. “Cathedral” here means whatever OSM has tagged building=cathedral, which won’t line up exactly with any one church’s official list. Treat this as a starting point, not the last word.