BeachPaws

Plan a better beach day with dog access and water-quality information. Explore every Environment Agency-designated bathing water in England, plus carefully curated non-designated beaches.

Filter by beach name, EA region, sediment (sand only / mixed), dog rules (year-round friendly, friendly in a given month, banned, unknown) and water-monitoring status. The 470-beach dataset contains all 464 EA-designated bathing waters in England plus 6 explicitly curated non-designated extras; it is not a list of every named beach in England. Dog-rule curation currently covers 303 beaches; the remaining 167 are honestly badged "Dog rules unknown" until researched, concentrated in Devon (35), Cumbria (16), Isle of Wight (15), Suffolk (9) and Tyne and Wear (9). See Expand coverage for next steps (the remaining unknown counties, and Wales/Scotland/NI).

Data sources

• Beach list, coordinates, sediment types, water quality: Environment Agency Bathing Water Quality API, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Covers all 464 EA-designated bathing waters in England. Each beach also carries a region field from one of six EA regional-organization areas (South East, South West, North West, North East, Anglian or Midlands) that drives the Region filter.
• Extra beaches: 6 hand-curated Kent bays (e.g. Kingsgate Bay, Dumpton Gap) that are not EA-designated, so they have no official sediment or water-quality record. Marked "Not an EA bathing water" on the site.
• Dog restrictions: hand-curated from council Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) pages. 303 of 470 beaches are curated so far (136 friendly year-round, 165 seasonal, 2 banned), spanning 18 counties in five EA regional-organization areas. Every entry records its source URL and the date it was checked. Beaches with no curated entry show "Dog rules unknown" rather than an assumed status. 167 remain, concentrated in Devon, Cumbria, Isle of Wight, Suffolk and Tyne and Wear (see Expand coverage). Restrictions change, so always check the council page before travelling.
• Directions: a "Get directions" link on each card opens Google Maps. It routes to the beach's coordinates where known, or a name+district search where coordinates are missing.

Files

File	Role
index.html, styles.css, core.js, app.js	The site (no build step, no framework); pure filter predicates live in core.js for browser and Node use
data/config.json	Country selector the pipeline fetches from the EA API (coverage label + countryUri)
data/dog_rules.json	Curated dog rules, hand-edited and never written by the pipeline
data/extra_beaches.json	Curated non-EA beaches, hand-edited and never written by the pipeline
data/beaches.json	Generated dataset the site loads, pipeline output that must not be hand-edited
data/counties.json	Curated district-to-ceremonial-county lookup used by the County filter
data/warning_baseline.json	Expected pipeline-warning classes used by data validation
scripts/build_data.py	Pipeline: EA API + curated files → beaches.json
scripts/validate.py, scripts/check.sh	Data validation and the repository's combined check command
tests/core.test.js	Node tests for date-window, dog, sand, normalization and search predicates
.github/workflows/check.yml	Runs scripts/check.sh for GitHub changes
.claude/skills/verify/SKILL.md	Manual browser verification guide
LICENSE	MIT, covers the code
data/LICENSE	CC BY-NC 4.0, covers the curated dog-rules dataset (see Licensing)

Run the site

fetch() needs HTTP, so serve the directory:

python3 -m http.server
# open http://localhost:8000

Run the checks

./scripts/check.sh

The combined command runs formatting and lint checks, data validation, and the Node predicate tests used by CI. To run only the tests, use node --test.

Refresh the data

python3 scripts/build_data.py

Python 3.9+, stdlib only, no install needed. What it does:

1. Pages bathing-water.json filtered by data/config.json's countryUri to collect every English bathing-water id (~470 requests total including per-beach detail fetches; a couple of minutes).
2. Flattens name, district, region, coordinates, sediment types (→ sandy classification) and the latest annual water-quality class per beach.
3. Appends the curated beaches from data/extra_beaches.json (tagged eaMonitored: false).
4. Joins dog rules from data/dog_rules.json by beach id; beaches without an entry get status: "unknown".
5. Writes data/beaches.json only after every fetch succeeds, so a failed run never corrupts the committed dataset.

Warnings go to stderr: curated ids that match no beach, beaches with no dog entry (expected while dog-rule coverage remains incomplete across England), missing sediment/coordinates/district/region.

The pipeline never modifies the curated files. To update dog rules or add beaches, edit data/dog_rules.json / data/extra_beaches.json by hand and rerun.

Expand coverage

More dog-rule curation (same pipeline, no code change): 167 English beaches still show "Dog rules unknown", concentrated in Devon (35), Cumbria (16), Isle of Wight (15), Suffolk (9), Tyne and Wear (9), Cornwall (7), Lincolnshire (7), North Yorkshire (7), Somerset (7), Norfolk (6), and the rest in smaller numbers. Research a council's dog PSPO, add an entry to data/dog_rules.json keyed by the beach's EA id with source + accessed, and rerun. Note that some of the remainder are inland designated bathing waters (rivers/lakes in Greater London, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Nottinghamshire, West Yorkshire) where coastal-PSPO research doesn't directly apply.

Wales / Scotland / Northern Ireland (not yet implemented): water-quality monitoring is run by separate agencies: Natural Resources Wales (NRW), SEPA (Scotland) and DAERA (Northern Ireland). Each has a different data format, and none is confirmed to have as clean an API as the EA's. Adding a nation means a new fetch function per agency in scripts/build_data.py, plus the same manual council-by-council dog-rule curation. Bigger lift than the England expansion; scope it separately when the time comes.

Licensing

This repository is split three ways. Check which one applies before reusing anything:

• Code (index.html, styles.css, core.js, app.js, scripts/, tests/): MIT. See LICENSE.
• Curated dog-rules dataset (data/dog_rules.json, data/extra_beaches.json): Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). This hand-researched, source-cited dataset is the project's differentiator, so it isn't released under the permissive code license. See data/LICENSE.
• EA-derived fields in data/beaches.json (location, sediment, water quality): Open Government Licence v3.0, same as upstream. These fields are unaffected by the NC restriction above; only the joined-in dogs field on each beach is CC BY-NC. See data/LICENSE for the full breakdown of that file.