Universal Publishers produce the ubiquitous UBD-Gregory'sstreet directories in Australia. The names of these publications have come to be used as a generic term for street directories in many Australian cities.
Company profile
Universal publishes street directories, guides, maps and road atlases and is Australia's largest mapping and travel-related products publisher. The company distributes travel, language, and cartographic ranges for Berlitz, Insight Guides, Michelin and Marco Polo.
A variety of fold-out maps covering capital cities, regional areas and entire states
DVD versions of the capital/regional city street directories and regional Cities and Towns directories
Road atlases covering the whole of Australia
The above products were branded UBD prior to the 2012 editions when production of standalone Gregory's street directories ceased in favour of cobranded UBD-Gregory's directories retaining the UBD format, with the exception of the Darwin directory which is still published in Gregory's format. The last standalone Gregory's directory was the commemorative 75th Edition Sydney street directory, published in 2011. 2018 directories showed as being issued by UBD as a subsidiary to Hardy Grant Travel while 2019 directories show as being issued by Hardy Grant Travel with no mention of UBD although the Hardy Grant website shows the publisher as UBD Gregory's.
Comprehensive directories
While primarily street directories, UBD and Gregory's also contain details on public transport, bicycle paths, suburb and postcode details, public parks and reserves, landmarks, attractions, and also boat mooring details in recognised docks. They also contain maps of university campuses and crematoria. Prior to the UBD-Gregory's merger the UBD Compact street directories also contained a 'Cityside guide' with tourist information.
Cartography
The rendering of roads in most city and town maps uses the traditional drawing of two lines with the road name printed in-between,. In the UBD Melbourne directory maps show a single line with the name above or below the road to make it more appealing to people familiar with the Melway street directory. This mapping style is also used for road atlas maps and main road maps. UBD products are notorious for continuing to contain copyright traps: fictitious streets or buildings or other features, included for purposes of identifying competitor's products that have copied UBD's data without fieldchecking it. For this reason, UBD's and Gregory's products cannot be relied on completely for historical research. An example of a copyright trap is the 'boomerang factory' that appeared for many years on the UBD map of Canberra, in the industrial suburb of Fyshwick, on the corner of Newcastle and Barrier streets, which location was in fact an ex-governmental furniture depot. In other cases short dead-end streets or laneways, or long-forgotten proposed roads, may appear. As UBD's products are mainly designed for motorists, they do not show all pedestrian laneways in a city, particularly in cities like Canberra which have many footpaths connecting adjacent streets. This makes the maps less useful for pedestrians and cyclists in particular.
