Every map carries a scale, usually printed in the legend as something like 1:25 000. It is the single most useful number on the sheet, and almost nobody uses it.
What the number means
A scale of 1:25 000 means one unit on the map equals 25 000 of the same unit on the ground. One centimetre on the paper is 250 metres in the world. At 1:600 000, that same centimetre is six kilometres.
So the larger the second number, the more ground the sheet covers — and the less detail it can carry, because there is only so much paper.
The rule that matters
Forget the arithmetic and remember what each scale can name:
- 1:20 000 to 1:25 000 names individual streets. Map Studio's city wall maps sit here.
- 1:60 000 to 1:100 000 names suburbs, and the major roads but not the side streets. That is the regional range.
- 1:275 000 to 1:1 200 000 names towns. That is the provincial range — Gauteng at 1:275 000, the Northern Cape at 1:1 200 000, each drawn as close in as an A0 sheet allows for the size of the province.
- 1:5 000 000 and beyond names countries. That is the Africa and world sheets.
Working out what you need
Ask one question: what is the smallest thing you need to find on this map?
If the answer is a street address — a delivery, a call-out, a site — you need a city sheet, and nothing else will do. If it is a suburb, a regional sheet will do and will cover far more ground for the money. If it is a town, buy provincial. If it is a country, buy continental.
The expensive mistake goes the other way: buying a provincial map for work that happens at street level, hanging it up, and finding it cannot answer the question you bought it for.
One more thing scale tells you
Scale and sheet size together tell you roughly how much ground is on the wall. A two-metre sheet at 1:25 000 covers about fifty kilometres across. The same two metres at 1:600 000 covers twelve hundred. That is the trade you are making, and it is worth making deliberately.
We have laid every wall map we publish out by scale, sheet size and price on one page: which wall map do I need?