(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

I’m in the middle of “Walking the Bounds” for Rushcliffe and need to find which Derbyshire ‘unnamed_shape’ (aka “non-civil parish”) is the one for Long Eaton (it is on the Rushcliffe border). That means ploughing through all those ‘unnamed_shapes’ in the list of Parish gpx. Whilst I do that I may as well document all the shapes:—

Overview:

See Also:

(council pdf) Districts + Parishes
Derbyshire Civil Parishes (wikipedia)
(note that a Civil Parish (CP) has zero connection with an Ecumenical Parish)
OSM Wiki: What is a Relation
OSM Wiki: Relations for BoundaryLines
OSM Wiki: HowTo Add a New Member to a Relation
Proposal for UK Admin Boundaries
Parish Codes (2015)

Admin Tags for Derbyshire:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:type=boundary
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative: (on the relation grouping those ways)

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=1: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=2: (Border, external (with Irish Republic))
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=3: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=4: (Border, internal (with Wales/Scotland))
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=5: Region is “East Midlands”
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=6: County/Unitary_Authority is “Derbyshire, City of Derby”
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=7: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=8: Borough/District (eg Amber Valley District)
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=9: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=10: Parish (eg Alfreton CP)

Attribution:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:source=OS_OpenData_BoundaryLine

Extra Tags:

… See full entry

zarl made a comment saying that he “enjoyed my nicely illustrated mapping adventures”. The last photos that I took were 3 weeks ago, because I use Mapillary to store the photos & their site had become dog-slow after an upgrade (it seems to have improved now, so I can stop my desktop surveying & restart doing it on the ground again soonish).

So, here for zarl are a couple of new photos from previous sessions. The first above was taken at Car Wash Factory on Cavendish Road in Carlton, and looks halfway decent at full-screen. One of the things that I find interesting in this is the way that both men in the photo know that they are being photographed (it took a couple of minutes, as I struggled to get the framing correct) but studiously behave as if that was not happening. Natural actors!

… See full entry

I set out the neat arrangement for https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level admin tags for BoundaryLines in a recent post on Nottingham Civil Parishes. I thought that I had discovered a discrepancy when I hit the bureaucratic inventions of Yorkshire and the Humber + North Lincolnshire, but maybe not.

Here is the relevant snippet:

Admin Tags for Nottinghamshire:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:type=boundary
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative: (on way and/or on relation grouping those ways)

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=1: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=2: (Border, external (with Irish Republic))
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=3: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=4: (Border, internal (with Wales/Scotland))
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=5: Region is “East Midlands”
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=6: Unitary_Authority/County is “City of Nottingham/Nottinghamshire”
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=7: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=8: Borough/District (eg Rushcliffe District)
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=9: n/a
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=10: Parish (eg Alverton CP)

The heart of the issue for OSM was that North Lincolnshire was originally listed as a County (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=6), whereas it’s modern designation is as a Unitary Authority Area. I’ve changed it’s admin_level to ‘8’, although I fully understand why the previous author would have put it as a county, but it is not.

2016-Aug-16: Correction to above; although the OS provide Unitary Authority .shape files together with Borough and District .shape files, the UA is listed under OSM as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:admin_level=6. My bad.

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas + Dinnington St. John’s CP Repaired + Renamed)

Bassetlaw district

I’ve acquired a taste for renewing boundary lines. It consists of (what I call) “Walking the Bounds” (in plain-speak, following a boundary upon the OSM map in JOSM, either clockwise or widdershins) and, together with the appropriate OS_BoundaryLine checking that the existing boundary is accurate for 2016. I’ve just completed doing that for Bassetlaw. It took 2 days and was a horrible experience.

Much of Bassetlaw had already been corrected to the OS, but the rest required the necessary nips‘n’tucks to bring it back into good order. That was good fun; I enjoy the feeling of bringing the map into good order. Folks in the past did the best that they could with the tools & equipment available at that time. We have much better references & tools now, and especially with the government’s astonishing OpenData declaration and the subsequent data releases from Ordnance Survey.

I also took the time to correct the multiple variants on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:source=OS_OpenData_BoundaryLine. I also found that great fun (I’m deeply anal). However, it still took a full-time 2-day slog (we are talking 12-hour days here) and was far more difficult than it needed to be… The Bassetlaw.gpx is 154.9km which is big, but should hardly represent 2-days of breaking your bones against unnecessary obstacles… The point here is that, once again, I kept coming up against situations in which the admin BoundaryLine had been merged with a river, or a road, or a field boundary, or a wood, or a… gaah…

<rant>

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

I mentioned in Repairs to Woodsetts CP Boundary that Dinnington St. John’s CP was involved in the same cartographic atrocity within a Woodsetts field that had afflicted Woodsetts CP, and needed repairing for the same reason. It also needed a rename as it had been wrongly called Dinnington St. John’s TC.

Dinnington St. John’s has been given a full, laborious & time-consuming set of nip‘n’tucks in order to convert it from a boundary based on NPE maps to one based on 2016 OS_BoundaryLines. The old parish line was always 10s of metres from true. Some of the lines were 100s of metres from true; only the name in the tags window helped me hold on to the view that I was still dealing with the correct BoundaryLine. I ended up needing to use Letwell CP.gpx, Firbeck CP.gpx + Dinnington St. John’s CP.gpx (watch out for the unescaped apostrophe) downloads.

It’s only a small parish (21.3km) but has a tremendous number of small-scale twists, turns & dog-legs. It had also ended up with a rogue, unused way within the relation due to the earlier atrocity.

This is Dinnington St John’s parish

Spam #1: (gone spam 1…) (Indian films, which launches sub-sites without asking; turkish launch page)
Spam #2: (gone spam 2…) Facebook restaurant spam

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

Woodsetts appeared on my screen (literally & metaphorically) whilst entering the very wonderful Worksop Unparished parish on to the OSM map. The northern edge of Worksop parish that I was working on (pun deliberate) was at the southern edge of Woodsetts CP. However, the Woodsetts parish line seemed to be 200m or more adrift from it’s true place.

‘CP’ is short for “Civic Parish”, and is the smallest of the English Administrative boundaries (admin_level=10). Woodsetts CP was entered before my OSM time, in the days when one of the few bits of reference material available was NPE maps. Now, I understand fully that “something is better than nothing” (I already have that attitude to Bing imagery), but when I see “source=NPE” I have now come to expect wild inaccuracies. And am rarely disappointed, with Woodsetts CP as my current example.

Woodsetts Road is a tertiary highway that runs north out of Woodsetts village. After a short distance it meets Acorn Lodge and changes into Gilding Wells Road; to the East of that road is a farmer’s field that contains the site of a Cartographic atrocity!

One of the parishes to the north of Woodsetts is Dinnington St. John’s. Did you spot the single quote in that name? Well, unfortunately csmale did not. URLs within his Parish page use single quotes as delimiters within HTML <a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:href=...> syntax, but have not themselves been encoded, which means that the Dinnington St. John’s link is ineffective. It should be http://csmale.dev.openstreetmap.org/os_boundaryline/parish_region\Rotherham_District\Dinnington_St._John's_CP.gpx (which will work in a browser or JOSM). However, in html page source the quote (‘'’) should have been rendered as ‘%27’ (so-called “percent encoding”) (this also normally applies to spaces, but all spaces have already been transformed to underscores (‘_’)).

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

It’s vital to have your UK civil parish area entered in the map if you want your house and/or locality to be easily found by the search & location aspects of OSM. However, many areas of the country are Unparished, and that includes 9 distinct areas in Nottinghamshire (12 towns). The Ordnance Survey have provided shape files for every parish, and that includes the Unparished parishes. However, each of the latter is unnamed. Before I did the research, none of the Nottinghamshire Unparished parishes were on the map. They are now!

Worksop is one of the last Unparished parishes waiting to be added to the map, and Unnamed_shape_5619 shows the boundary under JOSM. In contrast to all the others it seemed to be the easiest, as it needed the least editing. However, right at the end it threw a little wobbly.

Part of the northern edge of the 5619 boundary ran up Worksop Road (A57) then turned right along an unclassified road and Owday Lane. In contrast to all of the other 37km of the boundary, this little length along the unclassified + Owday Lane had no other boundary line already on it. That smelt all wrong.

A couple of hundred metres north of this unpopulated line was a way with a dozen or so boundaries in it, running parallel to Owday Lane through the middle of woods:-

1. Nottinghamshire (Ceremonial); (vice_county); (administrative admin_level=6 (County))
2. South Yorkshire (Ceremonial)
3. East Midlands (administrative admin_level=5 (Region))
4. Yorkshire and the Humber (administrative admin_level=5 (Region))
5. Bassetlaw (administrative admin_level=8 (District))
6. Rotherham (administrative admin_level=8 (Unitary_Authority))
7. North and South Anston CP (administrative admin_level=10 (Parish))
8. Woodsetts CP (administrative admin_level=10 (Parish))

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

What fun (not) this is.

A fantastic amount of work has already been put into the OSM map by masses of folks in the past. In this diary entry I document myself trampling all over some of their work and (hopefully) leaving all the good bits intact as I make nips & tucks to correct some errors introduced from NPE maps & stuff in the past in addition to adding a hole (which is what, in effect, an unparished parish is).

The source material for these edits is csmale’s GPX downloads derived from the 2016 OS .shape files. Those include the latest corrections to all UK BoundaryLines.

I’m absolutely terrified when editing these sorts of things! By the nature of Boundary Lines there can be several boundaries within the same line. In OSM a boundary is established as a Relation. That relation’s members are the ways that constitute the totality of the boundary. There are 6 different levels of administrative boundary, from Border, external (admin_level=2) (with the Irish Republic) down to the Civic Parish (CP) (admin_level=10). By the nature of it, each lower level consists of sub-divisions within the larger boundary that is the level above it.

Then it swiftly gets more complicated. There are also Ceremonial boundaries (I have zero idea as to the difference between it & an Administrative boundary). And there are others, some of which — in my darker moments — I begin to think have been invented, just for malicious fun.

To illustrate, here is a current tally of boundaries within the area that I started at, at a spot where both Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire County boundaries meet Warsop CP (southern tip):

… See full entry

Serendipity allowed me to be in the right spot at the right time to catch a troupe of Travellers as they began to setup their Summer Fair on the fields above the Carlton Richard Herrod Centre:

… See full entry

The world is discovering how easy it is to spam OSM. These are the latest:

(gone spam 1) …leading to an inspiring talk on “Become a Respected Leader of the Good and Easy” (zero application to OSM; just more spam)

(gone spam2) …leading to an inspiring webpage on Jeep - it’s natural agate (Round trips organized fun days possible integration of ATV trips rural romantic campfire meals around the campfire gourmet meals)

(many thanks to admin + mods for removing these users)

I got a very welcome invitation to go see my grandchild Ollie’s final performance at his Junior School (playing Jim-lad in Treasure Island). The family live in Ware, Herts SG12 and the map was house-free; no houses had been added in Ware at all. That was going to change!

The invitation was last-minute (the performance was the following day) and I wanted to look my best. The folks that did my hair were at the bottom of Donkey Hill, whilst I lived at the top. It was 30℃ heat, but this was important, so I walked down to them. The shop was still there, and so was all the equipment, but none of the staff. They had moved to Albany House Day Service (up and over the hill & across the ridge then halfway down the other side).

… See full entry

Lynne Truss, for those who do not know or have heard of her, is an English humourist & writer who has a particular obsession with the importance of punctuation. She once stood outside of a shop (I believe that it was in London) with an apostrophe on the end of a stick, holding it up at the place that it was missing from text on the front of the shop. Wonderful; I empathise deeply.

I’m a couple of weeks behind in uploading my surveying; this was in Carnarvon Grove in Carlton and, although it may not be the case, I fantasised that perhaps someone bought the house without an apostrophe and, being infected with the same obsession as Lynne (and myself) could not stop themselves from adding it.

Added Sunday 24 July:

… See full entry

(reported spammers now removed)

I’m surveying my way currently through Carlton NG4, which is the suburb next-door to Nottingham NG3. In all the days & weeks that I’ve been covering this area I’ve puzzled over why Carlton does not have a designated area in OSM + where to find it. I believe that I may have discovered the answer for both questions.

csmale has put in place GPX file downloads for Counties, Districts, Boroughs, Unitary Authorities and Civil Parishes/Communities in the UK (sourced from Ordnance Survey shape-files + converted into gpx files for easy import) — how fantastic is that! Nottinghamshire is available as a county and Nottingham + other Boroughs/Districts are available as a Unitary Authority. The next level down from Unitary_Authority/Borough/District is Civil Parish, and they are all available as well. Hooray!

The 9 English Regions are available for download from OSM in multiple formats.

There is a worm in every apple it seems, and one problem with the Notts CPs is that, whilst most have a name, eight do not. So, to try & help, and after ludicrous amounts of research, here are the best answers that I can find:

Overview:

See Also:

(council) parishmaps.pdf
Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes (wikipedia)
(note that a Civil Parish (CP) has zero connection with an Ecumenical Parish)
OSM Wiki: What is a Relation
OSM Wiki: Relations for BoundaryLines
OSM Wiki: HowTo Add a New Member to a Relation
Proposal for UK Admin Boundaries
Parish Codes (2015)

Admin Tags for Nottinghamshire:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:type=boundary
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=administrative: (on the relation grouping those ways)

… See full entry

As I’ve gotten further into the Carlton heartland (earliest houses in the suburbs: late 1800s / early 1900s, with a large number of 1920/1930s semi-detached) I was surprised to see a number of khazis. A few had been kept for their original purpose (very useful if you get caught short whilst gardening), but most had been converted into tool-sheds. I’m surveying now close to the heart of Carlton and came across a row of Worth Street khazis which could conveniently be photographed from Cavendish Road. This is the khazis close up (the pussycat is a bonus item):—

…whilst these two photos are the same buildings from a distance (in both cases the khazis are on the left, covered with greenery to hide their blushes):—

… See full entry

The helpful householder at 88 Main Street, Carlton pointed out the Benchmark on his house:—

Benchmarks were originated by Ordnance Survey in the days of mechanical measurement:—

Ordnance Survey Bench marks (BMs) are survey marks made by Ordnance Survey to record height above Ordnance Datum. If the exact height of one BM is known then the exact height of the next can be found by measuring the difference in heights, through a process of spirit levelling.

That neatly explains the BM numbers which you can find on old maps. In this modern Star Trek age, when anyone armed with a communicator (sorry, I mean mobile phone + suitable app) can measure their position & height above mean sea-level, the Ordnance Datum Newlyn is a touch out of date.

Unfortunately, I do not seem to be able to find a simple method to attach a Benchmark reference to a house in JOSM that will show on the map.

… See full entry

The UK government provides Land Registry Public Data, amongst which is the strangely-named INSPIRE Index Polygons. That webpage says that they are “to help you locate registered freehold land and property in England and Wales”, and provides 348 ZIP files to do this.

~$ unzip -l UK/data/Abertawe_-_Swansea.zip
Archive:  UK/data/Abertawe_-_Swansea.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
    68938  2016-07-03 09:36   INSPIRE Download Licence.pdf
128987164  2016-07-03 09:36   Land_Registry_Cadastral_Parcels.gml
---------                     -------
129056102                     2 files

I’ve just wasted a week of my life getting these files into a 48GB PostGIS db, only to discover that there is zero information in there other than GIS data. In other words, there are lots & lots of geometric polygons (very useful) and zero description on those polygons.

I was hoping to be able to find Areas for Borough Boundaries, and stuff like that. Oh spit.

Here is a quick run-through on how I managed to do all this. I had zero experience beforehand. Christian Ledermann, a Polish chap that adopts the name cleder & came to the June Nottingham Pub meetup to demonstrate his UK School import utility told me: “I have a little script that downloads everything and puts it into a postgis db (and shapefiles as an intermediate step): https://github.com/cleder/uk-landregistry ”. Christian’s script is woefully short on documentation & details, whilst his UK schools utility would act as an efficient MITM attack vector on OSM (hoovering up usernames & passwords), and did not work for me.

The following has been achieved under a fully updated Debian 8.5. I actually used Synaptic for most installations, but that is GUI whilst I can more easily show apt-get instructions here. Look at the OSM Wiki for PostGIS Installation for more help.

… See full entry

I’ve been mapping since 21 March, 2016 and have placed several thousand houses on to the Map in Nottingham NG3 & NG4 in that time. It is hardly surprising, then, that I’ve become a little obsessed with street names & house numbers & names. I did some research to try to settle all that inside me; so, here is a miscellany & glossary of facts about English house-numbers & street-names.

… See full entry

The developers state:

“most plugins are unmaintained”

This fact does beg the question: “why does the JOSM system actively encourage the user to submit a bug report when it suffers a software exception during plugin use?”

The greatest part of my time using JOSM is in fact using terracer; in the 4 months since I started surveying for OSM I’ve used it to place several thousand houses upon the map in NG3 & NG4. Unfortunately, as the developers have improved JOSM they have further degraded terracer; the associatedStreet Relation facilities within terracer can now not be used at all, else JOSM needs to be restarted & all prior work thrown away.

The very first time that I used terracer it crashed JOSM. I wasn’t too surprised; my opinion of Java is exceptionally low after experience under Windows. However, my computer was using Debian (an open-source GUI), so I eventually used the bug-report system. What an utter waste of my time:—

Advice for Making a JOSM Bug-Report

(slightly prejudiced)

1. Don’t bother
2. Definitely don’t bother if it is a Plugin
3. Upgrade all to the latest snapshot
   (the developers will ignore your report otherwise, but never inform you of that fact)
4. Only one bug-report / year
   (else you may be called a spammer)

Advice in Using terracer

1. Never select ‘create an associatedStreet relation’
2. Never select ‘keep outline way’

(you now have a good chance of entering houses without crashing JOSM)