Surveying has been completed for five new maps in the CycleCity Guides/Sustrans series of National Cycle Network maps. Covering the Thames Estuary and Essex (sailing barges at Maldon pictured), Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and the Fens, the maps will be published this spring and follow the success of 10 existing titles from Cornwall to Kent. They will be available from our shop or from Sustrans.
Four Point Mapping 
The maps may be good, but what about the infrastructure on the ground. My experience of the NCN, is very mixed. Some urban routes are very good, while rural routes tend to be on very quiet country roads. However, off road routes are often in a very poor state of repair. For example there is a section of the NCN in Cambridgeshire that I regularly use for commuting, but only in the summer, right now it is a mud bath and unusable. Do the maps convey this sort of information about surface conditions – it would be very helpful if it did.
As Velorichard says, the National Cycle Network is not to a uniform standard. Even surfaced off-road routes can be subject to damage – look at some routes in the South West as a result of the recent floods. All the basic survey data has the surface type recorded as well as its “condition”. But this is always a snapshot in time and can change in a matter of a couple of hundred yards. Hard and smooth maybe in summer, but muddy and horrible in winter. Potholed one summer but fixed by the local council in the winter…We do mark areas known to be rough on some maps (parts of the Ridgeway in Wiltshire and the South Downs Way for example), but the rest is just too subject to change to show in detail at the map’s scale (1:110,000). The answer will be (and it will come!) an online version of the map, where the condition of each section can be highlighted and users can post comments and pictures.