My last Diary was a HowTo on using JOSM to create a Relation to map Heath Mount School. Heath Mount was founded in 1796 & occupies 40 acres of the Woodhall Estate close to Ware in Hertfordshire. Now, just to show that some people & places may be created more equal than others, here is the Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which is also close to Ware & occupies 500 acres. This one has been a little bit more of a challenge to map.

◦ Haileybury College (OSM map)
◦ Haileybury College (OSM relation - 130 members)

The bulk of the mapping is complete for this College (85 different items so far) but lots of buildings still to follow.

First a quick bio, then mapping highlights:

The East India College (named after the East India Company, which had the obligation to maintain it) had existed on the site since 1806 but closed in 1858 following an Act of Parliament. By 1862 a Haileybury College became an independent public school on the same site, and has continued ever since, now for boys & girls.

The School cadastre already existed when I began the Relation, as did most of the buildings & many of the ground features. A number of the buildings were named, but not all. The website has an overview of the campus but the buildings are not named on that page.

I phoned the school up & spoke to a lady who sent me a PDF that named most (not all) of the buildings. Hooray! If I point out that it has 13 dormitory Houses on site, each ‘House’ of which often comprises multiple buildings, you may begin perhaps to get some measure of the scale of this place.

1. The Relation was created with the Cadastre selected & set to outer within the Member list.
2. All tags were moved from the Cadastre to the Relation
   (no tags at all were left on the Cadastre in this situation)
3. I used the campus PDF as my tick-list to map all school buildings
4. After completing all mapping for an individual group of buildings each was added to the Relation
5. Most buildings are set as inner within the Relation Member
   (every Member is inside the Cadastre, which itself is set as outer; another Member that is mapped inside another Member would require setting as outer; JOSM performs integrity checking on uplift & suggests a sensible fix on this one, so uplift often & fix all errors)
6. I’ve tried to give a sensible naming scheme + ordered the Members accordingly

Some Help Wanted, if you Can

I’m in the middle of the final batch of building entry, which is the magnificent Dining Hall/Quad/Chapel/Terrace collection shown in the picture at top of this Diary. There are many school Houses, Academic places & school sections located within this complex & I’m struggling with how to map it, and could do with some advice.

I had to redo the Dining area to get the holes mapped (a Multipolygon - the classic OSM method to map a building with internal quads open to the sky, in which the exterior wall is tagged ‘outer’ & internal quads are tagged ‘inner’). That was relatively easy, since the Catering section & the 1932 Dining Hall designed by Sir Herbert Baker do not interfere with the Multipolygon at this moment. However, other sections are within the walls & (although I tried) I failed at mapping them as building sections.

The obvious method (I think) is to map them using the Site relation and map them as a set of rooms. My main concern is that I may switch the entire site collection from it’s current Multipolygon to Site (although I suspect that that may prove to have show-stoppers of it’s own), and do not want to introduce future show-stoppers at this stage.

I’ve had a quick try with indoor=room for the Common Room & Sixth Form Centre. Both show with the Relation, of course, but neither shows on the map by itself, which suggests that indoor tagging has very low priority.

(An example of a Multipolygon relation showstopper is that it can contain only ways; It cannot contain complex Multipolygons (buildings with holes) nor lines (each thows errors); it is also not supposed to contain nodes, although the enforcement is lax on that).

25 April Update:
I’ve completed & uploaded some significant surgery on the Quad building (start_date=1809). Fortunately I was able to complete it without having to first delete the original mapping (a close call in this situation). I think that the root cause is that recent Imagery such as Esri is:–

1. Shot such a long way off 180° overhead (unlike Bing)
2. Tile offsets vary wildly across short distances.

Although Bing is old that did not matter in this situation for this building, so I used that to map it.

The indoor=room mapping is not rendered on the standard OSM map nor in JOSM, and that is unfortunate as I need the names to display. For the Memorial Quad + Quad I used building:part=quad and the name does render in JOSM, but not yet in OSM (it may just be too early) (update: no, it just does not render). Regardless, whilst building:part is accurate for the Quads it would not be accurate for the various rooms. It looks like I may have to just live with their absence from general visibility unless someone has a brainwave.

26 April Update:
More building surgery, this time on the Terrace. Various abutments are now in place and it is correctly connected with the rest of the building. Once again, I was able to retain the original mapping.

The part marked as ‘Terrace’ is actually outside the building & faces across the Arboretum & field. That part is tagged building:part=terrace. The College is currently 105 members (including the Terrace) & still going.

There is a Portico facing the Quad (right-hand side of the picture above) and, after aligning the Terrace so that it fitted (and then fitting it) together correctly with the rest of the other 3 sides of the Quad I realised with some surprise that much of the Portico was missing. Well, not now. The Chapel now correctly fits on top of that Portico (it was actually too big before).

What I would love to do after Lockdown is over is to be able to visit & photograph the various buildings for Mapillary. This looks like a wonderful site for that.