EDIT: This imagery will only be out of copyright from the end of 2022 (in other words, we will be able to use it in 2023). Also in 2023, building and housenumber imagery from 1940s to 1960s will be released for the whole of England and Wales

As anyone mapping in the UK knows, in most areas housenumber coverage is abysmal. For example, in osm, germany has 14 million housenumbers, USA has 10 million and the UK has about 1.6 million (as of 2018).

Therefore, an open data source of housenumbers would make it significantly easier to add housenumbers. The only other method is surveys, which is slow and tedious and can only really be done over a small area.

It just came to my attention that an out-of-copyright map from the National Library of Scotland of housenumbers and buildings in London is available for OSM. This is a old map, that was surveyed from 1944-1967.

Due to this, lots of construction and destruction has taken place since then, so in some areas of London, this map will not be useful. However, many buildings have remained the same since then, and if that case this map provides a far, far quicker way of mapping housenumbers compared to going out and surveying them yourself.

To test the imagery, follow these steps (in JOSM):

1. Imagery –> Rectified Image
2. Select “Custom WMS Link”
3. Enter the following string into the textbox (including the “tms:” part): tms:https://geo.nls.uk/mapdata3/os/ldn_tile/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png

This map extends to Brighton and Southend, although it does not provide housenumbers in those areas, only buildings. (However, for some reason housenumbers are present in the districts west of Brighton, e.g Worthing)

If you want examples of this imagery being used, user Spiregrain has mapped significant sections of “Stratford New Town” in London using this imagery. I mapped some housenumbers in Sheerness using this imagery.

This should be very useful to many London mappers, and it would be great if people would start entering this data right away.

However, I think the best way of getting all this data into OSM is by using a tasking manager.

As of current, I don’t think there is a UK tasking manager, I think it is worth it create one just for this task.

The other advantage of a tasking manager is that you can mark “bad imagery”, in other words, you can mark tiles where construction has taken place, making the map useless.

If OSM UK can be contacted about implementing a tasking manager for this, that would be great.