31 Oct 2026 / Build notes

Making a map of Belfast's empty buildings

I wanted to know if anyone keeps a list of empty buildings in Belfast. Nobody does. There is no public, address-level register. What exists are quarterly figures from Land and Property Services, published on OpenDataNI.

At 30 September 2026 those figures showed 6,880 empty properties in Belfast: 2.2% of homes and 19.4% of business premises. That is a number, but it is hard to feel. So I asked Claude to help me build a map you can look at.

What it does

It is a 3D map of Belfast, built with MapLibre and OpenFreeMap tiles. The colours, the light direction and the sky follow the real position of the sun over the city. At night about a third of the buildings show lit windows, and the empty ones glow red. Live weather from Open-Meteo adds rain, snow, fog or lightning, and a time slider lets you try other hours.

What it doesn't claim

The 190 red buildings come from OpenStreetMap, from buildings mapped as ruins, disused, abandoned, vacant shops or closed venues. It is a sample, not an official list, and ten of them are grounds rather than buildings, so they lie flat. The stats panel uses the LPS figures. The map and the numbers come from different places, and the page says so.

You can try it at lights-out-belfast.netlify.app.