Mapping houses is a very slow business. I’ve done almost nothing else during the last 7 months as a full-time job, and have placed several thousand houses on the OSM map, yet that is less than two postcodes in Nottingham (NG3 + NG4). So, my experience is limited. In spite of this, out of the 2,800 photos (126.1 km) that I’ve uploaded to Mapillary in that time, a good number of them feature garages. Like this recent shot:

The above garages are in a reasonable condition, and that is probably due to them being overlooked from their owner’s houses. Far more often they are incredibly broken down & shoddy. And mostly disused, probably due to them being ideal burglar bait. Car owners prefer to park close to their house, and all the streets that I map on an evening are chock-a-block with cars parked up on the kerb and/or parked on hard-standing which has replaced the house front garden.

I’ve been continually surprised to keep finding large blocks of garages. Certain estates have been built with them interspersed throughout the estate. It seems to be a generational thing: those estates have been built (as best as I can tell) in the 1960s/1970s/1980s. And most of those garages are utterly redundant.

I’m currently working to finish mapping Porchester Gardens before the Autumn ices appear (steep slopes mean that I would need snow chains on my shoes). Most of that area was built-up in the 1920s/1930s; the occasional detached or semi-detached house has an original built-in garage extension (suitable for the cars of the time, which is to say incredibly narrow) but generally no blocks of garages.

There is an exception for every rule & the block of 10 garages at the rear of 8 flats that I mapped last Thursday 13 Sep was one such. It was as broken down as every other such block of garages, but one flat has put that to good use: