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:

type=boundary
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)

I’ve been seeing a lot of lions during my recent surveys in Carlton, Nottingham NG4 (possibly starting with this house), and therefore decided to make this Diary post.

We English seem to be obsessed with Lions – or at the least, obsessed with Lions cast in concrete or stone. One of my open-mouth-in-astonishment moments occurred when I went to see my brother at his home in Huddersfield. The sight that greets you when you leave the train station is of an 11 foot (3.4m) long lion on top of a building (the Lion of St George’s Square — the building had to be specially reinforced to support the original beast that graced the plinth):

The Huddersfield lion has been replaced with a fibre-glass replica, but the 2 Nottingham Lions in Slab-Square are (as best I know) the 1920s originals carved from stone. This is the Oscar, the southern Lion (RHS), photographed by myself a week ago:

… See full entry

2 months ago in my first diary entry I quoted Eriks Zelenka from his diary entry recounting how he had trouble with a “middle-class ‘paranoid guy’” and, eventually, ended up in a police station under arrest. And all of this was because Eriks was surveying for OSM in Wokingham, England. Hmm. Last Thursday I found my very own ‘paranoid guy’ (following me up his street, all the while shouting at the top of his voice “where’s your ID? where’s your ID?”). However, I managed to avoid being thrown into choky.

Much earlier I’d gone past a house with a piece of humorous garden furniture. Later it seemed to refer to this chap, so I went back on Saturday 2 July and photographed it:

… See full entry

The photo below was shot in Carlton on the last day of June. Alistair Cooke (the British writer & presenter of Letter from America until his death in 2004) said that America was the best country to be in to witness Autumn/Fall, and Britain the best country for Springtime but, as we all know, in June the flowers do bloom.

Many thanks to the (unknown) householder at #12 for a wonderful display.

It has taken 4 months, but it seems that finally, yesterday, I may have got the hang of how to photograph a sequence for Mapillary that works.

1. Photo of the top part of a terrace on Carlton Hill
   (click the down-arrow, twice)
2. 2nd photo
3. 3rd photo

With sufficient overlap between the frames Mapillary will stitch them together, then show them in an interesting way. In really slow motion. It’s a good facility, which can be used to show stuff in a useful manner.

The terrace seems to be a typical Victorian terrace of 4 houses. However (and as the 1st photo shows below) for some reason it has a small-width extension at the left side which extends at an angle forward to the length of the terrace (scaffolding had been recently erected at that end of the terrace):

… See full entry

The main trunk roads out of Nottingham are on the West & lead either to or across the M1 (the main English east-coast 6-lane motorway built in the 1970s). On the East side – which is where I live – most of the roads leading out of the town are B-roads, such as the B686 which can eventually take you to Southwell (pronounced locally as ‘suth-ell’) and Newark. That road is better known in Nottingham as Carlton Road then – at the point where Nottingham ends & Gedling begins – as Carlton Hill. At the top of that hill is (surprise, surprise) Carlton + Carlton shops.

If you are getting an impression of small-town & suburban for Carlton, then you are exactly right. The oldest date that I’ve spotted for a house in Carlton is 1906. The housing is mostly 1920/30s semi-detached with some Victorian (or later) Terraces + detached houses sprinkled amongst them.

The development of the shops is also a classic tale. Carlton is built upon a hill, and Carlton Hill is the road that leads in and out of Carlton on both sides. Enterprising householders at the top of the rise would have begun a shop in their front-room & extended into the back-room if successful.

However, there is not much room; the B686 is just 2 lanes and the maximum width on the pavement is only 3 metres. How very surprising, then, to see (what appear to be) two 10m+ surveillance masts in the middle of the pavement, one at either side + either end of the shopping street:

… See full entry

Tesco Carlton provide a well-maintained grassed area with trees, tucked unobtrusively between their store & Foxhill Road East. It has a wooden seat + rubbish bin, and was the perfect area on Thursday 23 June to eat a sandwich, choccy-bar + can of coke after a hard afternoon’s surveying.

Refreshed, I went on to acquire the contact details for the Carlton Police Station (it turned out to be ‘999’) (joke), then went home.

Coda October 2016:

I order to be able to build their superstore at the centre of Carlton, Tesco needed to be able to get a demolition order on a Children’s Primary School and also — and this is the one that blows my mind — get a churchyard deconsecrated (almost impossible for other businesses, but Tesco managed to do it). Guess where the old churchyard was located? Yes, you guessed it… it is the “well-maintained grassed area” where I took my rest.

On the Bing imagery within JOSM and (sacrilege!) Google maps (make sure that ‘Earth’ is enabled) you can find a Flood Lagoon nestled amongst all the Nottingham houses in Carlton, Nottingham NG4. The problem is that OSM does not have a “man_made:flood_lagoon” key/value, so I cannot show it to you on the OSM map (I made up what seemed to me to be the closest to what it should be but, of course, openstreetmap.org will neither store it nor show it).

Discovery:

I was surveying the even numbers on Foxhill Road Central on Monday 20 June when I came across a kiddie’s playground at the corner-junction of Foxhill & Carnarvon Grove. See if you can spot in this picture the single sign of this flood lagoon (hint: it is the locked-gate entry to a narrow strip of grass + workman’s hut at the back of the playground):—

My spider senses were tingling, but none of the locals that I asked knew what the hut was for.

… See full entry

I guess that I may be becoming obsessed, but I really like some of these front-door leaded light displays. Just 2 from yesterday’s (Thursday 23 June) survey down the odd numbers on Foxhill Road (signs of intelligence? I started at the top of the hill):—

Who’s that fool taking a photo?

Ah! Stayed out of the picture this time:

… See full entry

I was eulogising about House Art in these Diaries last Sunday 19 June, starting with a fine example of etched glass set within Leaded Lights in Hillview Road. The following day I set off on a long trek down the length of Foxhill Road West, followed by Central & East. Blow me down, but it was not very long before another superb example showed up:

It got worse. Halfway down was the Richard Herrod Sports Centre and, just beyond it, a former golf course recently converted into a housing estate. Every single house had a similar front door!

A little earlier was a more light-hearted example of this species: a house with a red squirrel climbing up a metal fence:—

… See full entry

Each School Crossing in Nottingham NG3 & Gedling NG4 has little plaster guardians. Here’s the very first one that I pictured on the OSM map (placed 3 April 2016, it is on a traffic choker on Gordon Road, outside of the Bluebell Hill Primary School:—

…and here is the latest one, which is on Foxhill Road East, placed on the Zebra Crossing outside of the Carlton Central Infant & Nursery School (school was turning out as I took this picture last Monday, as you tell by all the cars parked close to the zebra):—

… See full entry

Here are some nice examples of art expressed in the houses themselves. Only one full example, but first let’s start with a very beautiful front door in Hillview Road, Porchester, Nottingham NG4 (etched glass + stained glass leaded-lights):

Next is a modest little shield on the wall of a house in Ernest Road, NG4 (we English have been much influenced by the heraldry of the 14th Century):

… See full entry