There are many specialised tools to visualise geographic data. However, they are often expensive and have a significant learning curve. Free libraries in Python and R, enable users to not only work with shapefiles but also perform a variety of exploratory analyses and visualisations. In this talk we will look at London road works data and we use a variety of libraries in Python and R to analyse and create thematic maps. We will comment on ease of use and advantages/disadvantages of each ecosystem when it comes to novice users.