datashapefileunited-kingdom
I'm looking for a shapefile for the coastline of the UK.
I'm guessing the Ordnance Survey 'geo-portal' is the best place to get this, but whenever I go to the Ordnance Survey site I get the shakes. (Seriously, trying to find any data on that site is really traumatic. I don't have a spare three days.)
Does anyone just have a simple URL for such a shapefile?
If you simply want to dissolve the edges and are happy with having one large multipolygon feature of all buildings, you can simply use the fTools "Dissolve" tool ("Vector/Geoprocessing/Dissolve").
If you want to keep the attributes (in the case of OS Vector that would only be the ID, which seems to be rather arbitrary), you can split the dissolved vector layer and then assign the attributes of the original undissolved layer using "Join attributes by location":
This is a subset of two OS buildings shapefiles that were merged into a single shapefile using "Vector/Data management/Merge shapefiles into one". The colours are assigned randomly to show the individual features:
This is the result of the "Dissolve" tool: All features have been dissolved into a single feature with the ID of the first object, the break in the three central buildings is gone:
After splitting the feature using "Vector/Geometry/Multipart to singleparts", the buildings are individual features again, but they all have the same ID:
Running "Vector/Data Management tools/Join attributes by location" with the split layer as the target and the original merged layer as the Join vector layer, the buildings are reassigned their individual IDs:
The EEA (European Environment Agency) has a European coastline shapefile located here: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eea-coastline-for-analysis-1/gis-data/europe-coastline-shapefile
It's very detailed and contains the countries you need. You'll have to demarcate them into the relevant countries using another layer though.
The EEA is a great source for this kind of spatial data.
Best Answer
My number one source for shapefiles is DIVA-GIS, simply select your country (United Kingdom) and subject (Administrative areas).
Unzip the downloaded file and you should see 3 polygon shapefiles with differing top-levels. The layer GBR_adm0 contains a single polygon of the UK:
If you wish, you can convert this to a line shapefile (I used QGIS 2.6):