Allan Joyce Architects occupies the former Midland Bank on Bath Street and, in recent times, has purchased property adjacent to that building and then both developed & built an impressive set of apartment blocks at 22-26 Bath Street.

What Yanks name ‘apartments’ we Brits typically tend to call ‘flats’ and, in my experience, they indeed usually have very low ceilings. In contrast there are very few apartments within each of the 3 buildings, and Clive told me that they consciously gave them generous proportions. There is, however, one thing that they missed and therefore some advice that I would extend to him (no charge):–

Please assign names to your buildings

I have assigned a ref to each building so that they can be distinguished from each other in an OpenStreetMap Nominatim search.

The original terrace from 16→28 Bath Street has the postcode “NG1 1DF”, whilst the block just a few yards/metres away on Aberdeen Street would normally be mapped to “NG3 1JL”. Allan Joyce preferred “NG1” for all apartments (a sensible financial decision) but that leads to all buildings having the same address, which confuses Nominatim.

The very first search that I tried (using “22-26 bath street nottingham”) brought up just two results:–

1. “The Market Side 22-26 Bath Street” (1-3)
2. Apartments 4-6

…it was clear that Apartments 7-15 had been blindsided by Apartments 4-6 (this was before I added the ref). What was new for me was that the search included “The Market Side” as part of the result. This was due to “old_name=The Market Side” (it was previously a Public House), which is just one of a small suite of possible names now available within JOSM as a preset under menu:Presets/Annotation/Name:–

• Name (name=*)
  (optional extras):–
• Alternative Name (alt_name=*)
• Historical Name (old_name=*)
• Local Name (loc_name=*)
• Regional Name (reg_name=*)
• National Name (nat_name=*)
• International Name (int_name=*)
• Official Name (official_name=*)
• Common name abbreviation (short_name=*)

How to map Overhanging Roofs?

Allan Joyce built Apartments 4-6 with a roof that overhangs the adjoining Longden Street pavement and a part of the 2nd floor that overhangs the former Midland Bank building. I’m uncertain how to map any of that.

What Relation to use for all Apartment blocks?

I know that many mappers are either confused by — or just do not like — Relations. If instead you think of a Relation as an Index to a book (or perhaps as the list of Chapters at the beginning) you may begin to appreciate the way that placing things within a Relation can assist in getting them better comprehended and/or searched.

Looking through menu:Presets/Relations I found:–

1. Multipolygon
2. Building
3. Site

I’ve ruled out (2)Building, although that may help to answer my previous query on the over-hanging roof. However, I’m torn between (1)Multipolygon — which I’ve previously understood to better be used for single-buildings with holes such as courtyards — and the newer (3)Site, which sounds like it should be more relevant, but as yet seems to have few official members for the relation. I’m particularly thinking ahead to when I map some of the larger Hospitals, which can have scores of buildings on the same site, and for which a relation will form a godsend in finding the correct building and entrance.