After several years of work buildings are still patchy in OSM in London. The gaps are all too obvious when you use apps such as Maps.me, and of course mapping houses leads to better mapped roads.

After a time when I solidly filled in all of the houses in an area near where I live, I decided to change my mapping approach. I am now filling in buildings and addresses facing A roads and bus routes in half a London borough, the bit of Richmond upon Thames that is south of the river and east of the rest of the borough.

I see these buildings as important because:

1. People travelling along these roads get a full set of houses that they can follow.
2. As these are the longest roads they are the most valuable to search using the whole address because the street name is not precise enough.
3. This includes a large proportion of businesses that are worth mapping.
4. The gaps between mapped houses are broken up, this makes them more attractive for the long tail of occasional mappers to fill in the gaps; some of them could be our next enthusiasts.

As I write there is still a bit of work left.

One thing that [ have ducked out of tackling so far is the landuse polygons, which are a mess. They often intersect buildings, the commercial landuse in Barnes bears little resemblance to the actual town centre and polygons that were drawn arbitrarily on the map in Richmond acquired concocted names. The only quick thing I could have done would be to delete them completely, which I do not want to do unilaterally.

What could be done is to redraw the polygons adding the extents of the relevant properties to create one or more residential/commercial/other polygon for every street block, as the logical conclusion of landuse polygons that exclude roads. Extents are now available for import though it may very well be better to add them from aerial imagery.