Google Maps recently posted some new tiles. These seem to be generally an improvement over the previous, rather poor, set of tiles. Let's look at how these appear in the United Kingdom, and specifically London.
The most obvious feature here at the UK-wide level is the much bolder country name caption. This appears to be dependent upon the size of the country now, with the UK's text being much larger than Ireland's, which is a slightly unfortunate effect.
The choice of cities to caption at this level is much better than it has been sometimes - London, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds are all fairly substantial places. There's no accounting for the absence of Glasgow or Edinburgh, though.
The next zoom level is particularly odd in Ireland, as demonstrated by the appearance of Leap, a village with a population of 240. Why Leap is more important than Norwich is left as an exercise to the reader.
Moving in to London we see the Euston Road area. In the last set of tiles Euston station wasn't marked at all other than as a building - it has now re-acquired the Underground and Overground icons, although still no National Rail sign. It has a natty double-caption. Meanwhile, further to the east, there's no tube shown at Kings Cross St Pancras, and St Pancras is only indicated by the Domestic name, with no mention of St Pancras International.
The stations are clickable, although for some reason the Euston icon doesn't give access to the live Victoria/Northern line data that Warren Street (just off the side) does. The only other hyperlinked thing in this view is St Pancras Church, which is correctly placed and links to the appropriate website.
Zooming out a bit, we see in North East London the continuing bizarre collection of captions. At this level you'd expect to see names of well-known town centres in London - Hackney, Tottenham, Wood Green, Walthamstow, and suchforth. None of that here - instead we have names of parks and other open spaces, and informal names of areas such as "Harringay Ladder" (which refers to the rung-like roads in Harringay between Green Lanes and Wightman Road). The town centre labels do appear eventually - three zoom levels in.
So, in summary, these tiles appear to have fixed some of the sillier issues with things like missing stations, but still are making weird decisions about what to caption. At least one long-standing data bug (the name of the southern part of Wardour Street) has been fixed, and I've not noticed any regressions yet. A nice touch, that I think is new, is the addition of boat routes on the Thames.
