I'm writing this post a bit later than I intended. About a year late in fact, so here's hoping it's still useful!

Just over a year ago I was working on some design mockups that required nice partitioned maps of the UK and Ireland, divided up by county and/or region. The Ordnance Survey provides a rather spiffy vector map of Great Britain covering 'coastline and administrative areas'. There were two issues: I needed it to cover Northern Ireland and at least an outline of the Republic of Ireland, and I needed to group counties into regions.

So I spent a day grouping counties into regions and finding a way to build a vector outline of Ireland that fit the proper Great Britain outline I already had. I can't remember how I did it in the end; I think I overlaid and traced a map I found somewhere else to as close as the right scale as possible.

At any rate, it was a total faff so I thought I'd release the files for anyone else having the same problems. It's just taken a while…

Behold, a vector map of Great Britain and Ireland, based on Ordnance Survey's, with added region polygons for England.

Download the .eps file or .ai file.