How it works

You give it a point — a street, a hotel, a station — and how far you are willing to go. It shows what is around that point to see, eat, drink, run and get about, in an order it can explain.

A point and a radius

Most guides are organised by city. I started from a different question: you have booked somewhere, or you have a free afternoon in a place you do not know — what is within reach of here? So everything starts from a single point and a radius: 1 km for a walk, 2 km, 5 km for the district, 15 km for a day trip.

How far each kind of place reaches

Not everything is worth the same walk, so each category reaches a different distance from your point:

• See — the full radius.
• Eat, drink and coffee — half of it. Dinner is rarely worth a long trek.
• Run — one and a half times it. Good ground to run on is worth a short ride.
• Getting around — four times it, and never less than 6 km, because the nearest station is the answer however far away it is.

Each category shows up to 48 places.

The order things are in

There are no ratings here, and none are implied. Places are ordered by rules I can state plainly:

• Sights by how well documented they are: a place with a Wikidata entry, a Wikipedia article, a heritage listing or an official website comes before one with none of those, and nearer before further among equals. Documentation is the closest thing open data has to "worth seeing".
• Everything else nearest first.
• Places to run by how well they suit a run: big enough to be worth it (at least 200 m across), long rather than square, and not too far to get to.

Nobody can pay to appear here or to move up.

Your list

Add places to your list and they become a route, in the order you choose — drag them to reorder. Open the route in Google Maps, download it for Google My Maps, or copy it as text. The whole guide, list included, lives in the page's address, so sending the link sends exactly what you see.

What it cannot tell you

• Whether a place is good. Open data records that a restaurant exists, not whether the food is any good.
• Whether it is open right now. Opening hours are shown when someone has mapped them, but they go out of date. Check before you set off.
• Timetables or fares. Stations and stops are shown; journeys are not.
• Everywhere equally well. Coverage depends on how thoroughly a place has been mapped, which varies a great deal.

Where the places come from, and how fresh they are, is on Data & sources.