What does scale 1:1000 mean?
Scale 1:1000 means everything on the drawing is a thousand times smaller than in reality. One centimetre on the sheet is 1,000 cm on the ground, which is 10 m, and one millimetre is exactly one metre.
That last relationship is why surveyors and planners like this scale. Put an ordinary ruler on the plan, read the millimetres, and you have the distance in metres. A boundary that measures 23 mm on the sheet is 23 m long.
The scale factor is 0.001. Divide a real length by 1,000 to get the length on the plan, or multiply a plan measurement by 1,000 to get back to reality. In imperial units, 1 inch on the plan is 1,000 inches, about 83 ft 4 in. American engineering drawings usually use the similar scale 1 in = 100 ft instead, which is 1:1200.
Where is scale 1:1000 used?
On an A3 sheet, scale 1:1000 covers an area of about 420 × 297 m. That is several city blocks, and individual buildings, streets and plot boundaries are still easy to see. You will find it on:
- topographic and utility survey plans of built-up areas, where every building, kerb and manhole has to show,
- site plans and masterplans for housing estates, campuses, hospitals and industrial sites,
- zoning and land-use plans in several European countries, drawn over a survey base map,
- general arrangement drawings for roads, railways and pipelines that run for hundreds of metres,
- urban planning models, where a whole district fits on a table and a 30 m building is 3 cm tall.
In the UK, a planning application asks for a location plan at 1:1250 or 1:2500 and a block plan at 1:500 or 1:200, so 1:1000 turns up more in design and survey work than on the application forms themselves.
Scale 1:1000 in practice: examples
A few conversions to get a feel for the scale:
- A building plot of 25 × 40 m becomes a 2.5 × 4 cm rectangle.
- A house 12 m wide is drawn as a 12 mm line.
- A football pitch 105 m long is 10.5 cm on the plan.
- A 600 m street fills 60 cm, about the width of an A2 sheet.
- A distance of 37 mm measured with a ruler on the plan is 37 m on site.
Areas are just as quick. A 1 × 1 cm square on the plan is 10 × 10 m on the ground, which is 100 m².