This dataset for Historical Light Aids to Navigation (LAN) shows the development of historical lighthouses, lightships, harbour lights and beacons in England and Wales for several benchmark years between 1514-1911. The database was created using primary and secondary historical sources, including UK Admiralty publications and navigational charts, and the scholarly literature. Lighting systems found in these sources were recorded in a spreadsheet and manually located and given modern decimal coordinates using geographical information systems (GIS). This arrangement gives very good coverage of historical lighthouses and allows analysis of infrastructural change or otherwise at lighthouse locations over time. We recorded attributes for each named light, including number of lights, visibility range, and height of lantern. The data set is provided in shape-file and Excel spreadsheet file formats and is compatible with GIS.

LAN data was extracted from scans of filmed paper records using optical character recognition (OCR) and manual data-entry methods.