London Brutalist Map

Map of London's brutalist buildings built in React,TypeScript and Tailwind. Uses LibreMap and OpemFreeMap. Deployed to Netlify.

Why

• After the success of an html copy of this site, I wanted to rebuild it in a modern framework. Seeing as much of the functionality of that project was in JavaScript, I wanted to rebuild it in React, as it was hard to navigate the codebase, something a component based architecture would solve.
• I realised that this would allow me to use the mapbox NPM package rather than the CDN method I was previously using, which would allow me to host the geojson data myself - making it much easier to edit.
• During development, it became obvious that I could make a multi-page site with the data, now that I was selfhosting it, allowing me to display it in different ways. This would allow different users to engage as they wished.

Building

• First, I set up the app using Vite.

• Then I worked on each of the pages in the app, using Tailwind CSS to rapidly design them in a similar style to my Brutalist Map project.

• Taught myself how to use APIs in Javascript with fetch() and then applied this to React.

  • I spent a long time trying to get this to work - it was relatively simple with the Mapbox URL but I also wanted to use local geojson data where possible (easier to edit and reference).

• Added Brutalist Map into the page

  • React-map-gl as an API wrapper for mapbox-gl, with mapbox studio staying as the source.

• Added React Router to navigate between pages and serve a 404 page and Link elements to improve page load speed.

• Deployed to Netlify.

• Added markers to the map using a map function.

• Added controls to the map using the example in the React-map-gl docs as a guide.

• Added details of the buildings on hovering over them on the map. I tried using the example in the React-map-gl docs but unfortunately couldn't get it to work. A workaround was to create a custom marker, since React Map GL wasn't letting me add onMouseEnter events to the marker that comes with the NPM package. I then used State management, to set whether each marker was hovered over. This caused some flickering which I resolved by binding the onMouseEnter and onMouseLeave events to the div displaying the information on hover.

• Added click event on marker, similar to the hover event above. Used borrowed html and css from the index page.

• Edited map so visited buildings are highlighted green on the map.

• Transformed svg icons to React TSX components using an online tool - to allow for easier editing.

• Updated mobile look of site after some debugging on different screen sizes.

• I noticed some issues with images not loading, so I decided to download them from the links in the geojson data. I ran a python script to do this, and then another script to compress the .webp images down to below 1mb. This would improve speed.

• Abstracting out mapcontrol and customMarker components into separate files from the map component. This improves editability.

• Fixed a build error from incorrect typing.

• Added a landing page with custom SASS, to improve usability on the site. I used local storage to set this to only display on the first visit to the site.

• Add color variables to SASS, to make them easier to edit.

• Added a typography SCSS file to extract out of globals and make it easier to edit.

• Extracted common tailwind styles to scss, to make them easier to edit.

• Moved from Mapbox maplibre-gl, using the guides on OpenFreeMap and their tiling. This should enable people to contribute to this repository more easily (i previously used a mapbox api key tied to the local and production servers).

  • I used Maputnik to generate styles and Map Libre Font Maker to generate the font tiles I needed.

Resources:

Brutalism:

• Socialist Modernism
• SOS Brutalism Map
• [Brutalist London Paper Map] (https://bluecrowmedia.com/products/brutalist-london-map)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhuHiL8Pug
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvKi_hsJf3c
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-25/the-case-for-calling-brutalism-heroic-instead
• https://www.langhamhouseclose.com/
• Brutal London, Simon Phipps

Maps:

• Strikemap
• Space Invaders Photo Map
• Community Maps
• Pinball Map

Running on your machine

Clone the project and run:

npm install
npm run dev