Theatres — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a theatre. There are more than 50,000 worldwide. There is only one colour, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every theatre here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of theatres.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=theatre`. It stretches from a national opera house to a receiving house on a high street, a village hall with a stage and a studio room above a pub, and it takes in outdoor amphitheatres as well. Cinemas carry `amenity=cinema` and have a layer of their own. Because we match the tag exactly, a building tagged as a theatre and a cinema together is missed, though that way of tagging is uncommon.

Colour

There is one colour, and that is a decision rather than something we forgot. The useful division would be by what a theatre puts on, an opera house against a producing house against a studio room. OpenStreetMap has a tag for genre, but fewer than one theatre in twenty records it, and the values are free text rather than a fixed list. A legend built on that would describe a small corner of the map and guess at the rest. Size represents the building instead, which does separate an opera house from a studio room without our pretending to know what either stages.

Many theatres have no name

About one theatre in five carries no name in OpenStreetMap. Those are outlines somebody traced without recording what stands there, so clicking one tells you little beyond its shape and where it is. We keep them, because an unnamed theatre is still a building somebody surveyed and put on the map, and dropping it would leave a false gap in a town that has one.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the theatre in square metres. About two theatres in five have no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for a good part of this map the size is not telling you how large the theatre is. A theatre is usually a building of its own rather than a unit inside somebody else's, which is why so many of them have been traced. Among the theatres that do have a shape, a typical one covers about 750 m².

The largest features here are outdoor amphitheatres, which carry the same tag legitimately and cover far more ground than anything indoors. The largest covers more than half a square kilometre. We cap the size scale well below that so ordinary theatres stay distinguishable from one another. A very large dot in open country is usually a bowl in a park rather than a playhouse.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a theatre there, not that a place has nowhere to see a play. Mapping is more complete in western Europe, North America, Australia and Japan than in much of Africa and southern Asia. Countries also organise their stages differently, and a country where each town owns a municipal theatre genuinely has more separate buildings than one that gathers its theatres into a few cities.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A theatre shown here may have closed, and a closed theatre often keeps its building and its name for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map