About

Lost in the Lanes is a map and database of every named lane in Britain — 77,813 of them, across England, Scotland and Wales.

It began as a curiosity: how many lanes are there, what are they called, and where are they? The answer turned out to be more interesting than expected. Church Lane appears 1,993 times. There are 42 Pudding Lanes. Butthole Lane is in Leicestershire. And 25,579 lane names exist nowhere else in Britain.

The site was built using OS Open Names, the Ordnance Survey’s open dataset of named places and roads across Great Britain, published under the Open Government Licence.

It was created by Jack Thurston, author of the Lost Lanes series of cycling guidebooks, with a little help from AI.