Whereabouts

Whereabouts helps you find a house by name in the villages of North Yorkshire, the kind of address a satnav struggles with. It stands on the maps of Dr A Colin Day, who has spent years recording the names of the houses in the county’s villages and gives his work away free. The app adds a search box over those maps and passes the directions to your phone.

You can read more about how this project works here.

Every house here is placed by hand, so now and then a pin sits on the wrong roof, and some houses are only pinned to the middle of their village for now. Glance at the map before you set off, and take extra care where the same name turns up more than once.

Whereabouts covers North Yorkshire for now. Colin’s maps reach right across the north of England, so more counties may follow.

Whereabouts is built for places where signal comes and goes. Any map you open stays on your phone by itself; to make a whole area work with no signal at all, save it above. Tap a saved area if you ever want its maps off your phone again. And for one-tap access, add this page to your home screen: it opens like any other app, even in a dead spot.

You never need to think about updates. The app fetches the newest houses whenever it opens with signal and gives itself a fresh start each morning. If an area you saved gains new or revised maps, its button changes to “Update”: one tap brings it in line. Saved maps stay on your phone through all of this.

Every village drawing in this app is the work of Dr A Colin Day, who has spent more than twenty years mapping villages house by house and name by name, and giving the results away free, still updated by his own hand today. Long before this app existed, his maps were finding front doors for delivery drivers, healthcare professionals and anyone else a satnav had given up on. Colin has given this project his full support to build on his foundations. If it ever finds you the right door, the thanks belongs to him.