SITEDIA · UK

About sitedia

Last updated: 7 October 2026

sitedia takes one address and draws a full set of site analysis diagrams for it. Pick a site, pick a radius, and you get buildings, building use, heights, building age, planning designations, land registry plots, green space and water, streets, stations and bus stops, the walking catchment, urban grain, terrain, sun and wind — each in a matching circular or square frame, ready to download as SVG, PNG, DXF or 3D (GLB, 3DM, SKP). Everything is in metres.

Why it exists

Anyone who has put together a design and access statement or a competition entry has done this: screenshot a map, drop it into Illustrator, trace the buildings one by one, colour them by use. An hour or two per drawing, and you start again when the site moves. The time goes into drawing, not into thinking.

Yet almost everything in those drawings is public data. Building outlines, heights from the Environment Agency's LiDAR, the age bands on Energy Performance Certificates, conservation areas and listed buildings, the London Plan's designations, every bus stop in NaPTAN — it is all published. What was missing was a way to put it on a report page at a fixed scale, in a consistent frame, with a legend that matches.

That is the whole product. sitedia does not interpret your site for you. It draws the base material accurately and quickly, so the analysis is yours to write.

What it is not

It is not a planning check and not a feasibility study. The UK has no zoning map to read off: whether a scheme is acceptable depends on the development plan, its policies and the judgement of the local planning authority. The planning diagrams show where designations are drawn — the Central Activities Zone, Opportunity Areas, industrial land, Metropolitan Open Land, conservation areas, listed buildings, protected vistas — not what you may build. That data is incomplete in places, and a blank area does not mean that nothing applies.

It is not a survey either. Land registry plots are HM Land Registry INSPIRE Index Polygons, which show the indicative extent of registered titles, not legal boundaries. Every source has its own date and margin of error. Use sitedia for analysis and communication, not for anything that needs a measured drawing.

Coverage

The UK edition covers Greater London — the 32 London boroughs and the City of London — for now. Search by address or postcode. Building heights come from the Environment Agency's LiDAR, which covers England; building age comes from Energy Performance Certificates and Colouring Britain where a record exists, so some buildings are blank.

Where the data comes from

• Building outlines, streets, green space and water — Overture Maps (in the UK almost entirely OpenStreetMap, ODbL).
• Building heights — Environment Agency LiDAR Composite 1 m (surface minus terrain), Open Government Licence.
• Building age — the construction age band on Energy Performance Certificates (MHCLG, Open Government Licence), then Colouring Britain (ODbL).
• Planning designations — Greater London Authority (London Plan), planning.data.gov.uk and Historic England, Open Government Licence.
• Land registry plots — HM Land Registry INSPIRE Index Polygons.
• Stations and bus stops — NaPTAN (Department for Transport); line names from OpenStreetMap.
• Street trees — London Public Realm Trees (Greater London Authority).
• Aerial imagery — Esri World Imagery, shown on screen only.

Every source, with the exact credit, is on the data sources page. Every diagram carries its own source note in the exported file, so a drawing that leaves your desk still says where it came from.

Who made it

sitedia is built and run by one person — an urban designer who got tired of tracing buildings. It started as a Korean tool and grew US, Japanese, Spanish and now UK editions, because the problem is the same everywhere. If a diagram looks wrong, or a dataset you rely on is missing, the feedback button on the main page reaches me directly.