London’s map is still looking like a bloodbath when you look at the OSM Inspector License Change View and there’s not much time left to sort this out before the redaction bots do their thing and sort it out in one big chop. However the bloodbath view is a little misleading. Zoom in and you see patches of building outlines are the main cause of red blotches in central London for example. Easy enough to sort those out. Building outlines would have been mostly put in purely via armchair mapping with bing imagery.

Speaking of which, a few weeks back bing removed their super-hi-res imagery over London, leaving us only with the kind-of-hi-res imagery which was newer but more shadowy, and generally much harder to pick out details in. I suspected this would be a temporary thing, and today I was pleased to discover that the super-hi-res is back, but newly updated. They’ve now eliminated the kind-of-hi-res imagery set, and made the lower zooms more consistent, with no jarring changes or offset problems while zooming. Here’s what Fenchurch Street station (here) looked like last week versus now.

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But I don’t have an image of how it looked three weeks ago. Back then we had similar super-hi-res, but older.

It’s tempting to just sit back and see where the building outlines disappear when the license tainted data is removed, and then fill in some gaps using bing when the time comes.

However it is better to do remapping because we can do a better job of it (survey!) where it was only sketched from bing before, and in some places we need to try to avoid losing too much of the tagging data which has been added to the building outlines over time, after being initially sketched by a non-agreer. That’s true of this area around St Paul’s where we’re going mapping this evening.

I feel bad that I haven’t been sorting out this area on my lunchbreaks. I guess I need a pub prize at the end of it all to motivate me, and pub a prize we shall have in form of https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/146986827 The Butchers Hook and Cleaver. Clever name you see, because it’s right by the Smithfields meat market. See what they’ve done there? Come join us for beers and map chat. Join us for (re)mapping beforehand if you fancy it. Also I can meet people at 6:30 and give a mapping demonstration if this is requested (so far nobody this time) …But if it all sounds too confusing you’re very welcome to just see us in the pub. All the details. See you TONIGHT??!