Windmill Map

12 Apr 2021

Every windmill in the UK

My SO loves windmills. “Oh yeah, I like windmills too”, you’re thinking. But no..

We often travel around to visit a bunch in a given location but discover shortly after that there were others nearby we hadn’t known about.

Just use Google Maps though, innit?

Yeah but no because Google Maps doesn’t really discern a windmill from “Windmill Cafe”, “Windmill and Science Centre”, “Windmill Dress Agency” etc. Even on an API level (I tried, I really tried) among similar actual windmills one might be a ‘historical landmark’, another a ‘place of interest’ so yeah there’s no way to use it.

Source your own data!

Why not? I mean, it’s not like they’re building any new windmills so the data set should be relatively unchanging.

Wikipedia to the rescue? Nope! Wikipedia is famously not.. real.. data. I mean, articles are just markdown text formatting to the best of random peoples’ abilities (and supposedly IMDB is similarly horrific under the hood).

Windmill World to the rescue? Yes!

This was a fantastic resource, well curated and consistent. No API or DB unfortunately though so I had to painstakingly write a HTML parser to convert the whoooole thing into JSON arrays.

It did the trick though! Lots of sweet, juicy, delicious data ripe for displaying. Thousands of windmills in fact. So I’ve slammed them all into map markers with info boxes. Be warned.. your CPU might explode.