I do not know quite how I managed not to see these the last time I passed the tennis courts close to Huckerbys Field, but I didn’t:—

It was 27 July 2016 and I made a Diary Entry. My walk was along the identical path, just in the opposite direction. Well, whatever; they will be up on the map shortly.

This is a small meditation upon the fragility & fleeting nature of life and an encouragement, from one who is becoming old, to fix your gaze upon what you can be & never to stop.

I found a couple of houses on my last survey that appeared to be abandoned. The one above was particularly poignant because of it’s 2nd floor portico; I could imagine the owners and their guests in days past, standing with cool drinks on hot, balmy summer evenings, gazing across the vista of the fields of Marshall Hill as it fell away below them (Marshall Hill is one of the taller hills in Nottingham, and the houses that now cloak the hill are worth many millions of £ GBP). Today, the house is unloved & ill-kept, hedges, bushes and trees growing to the skies and hiding the house from view most of the time.

… See full entry

Let’s celebrate the eccentricity that lies at the heart of the English character.

This is the Flowerpot Man on the roof that I spoke of in my earlier Diary entry. I was worried about rain then, but it was spotting all day today (and raining hard by tea-time) so why worry today? However, it turned out that the householder valued his privacy, had a lock on the gate & no bell. I needed to get higher to get a good photo & could not (or at least, not without breaking in). My cheap smartphone has a decent camera but only a digital zoom (which I did not use), so the man is very small.

The next picture has another of my favourites, which is Gargoyles, in Marshall Hill Drive.

… See full entry

I feel like this myself at times…

This was the greeting that met you on coming through the side-entrance at a bungalow on Hallam Road but was not the best I saw yesterday (Thursday afternoon, 25 August). That was a Flowerpot man on top of a house roof in Pilkington Road (no, really). However, I was worried about the delay that obtaining agreement to photograph it might take. It had been pouring down with rain earlier on & I was worried about further rain soon (it never happened). I’m going back to the house another day, so maybe will be able to feature it soonish.

A recent Diary entry (A Suggestion to Fix Poor LSN in the UK) contained the phrase “Why those facilities fail for a substantial part (40%) of the UK”, and I promised to publish the raw data that led to the ‘40%’ claim. This is the fulfilment of that promise and be warned, it is long & intensely computer geeky.

In brief, that earlier Diary entry said:

1. Location, Search & Naming facilities (LSN) require the presence of an “admin_level=10” (civil parish) area in the UK
2. 40% of the UK does not have such an area, as it is unparished
3. (thoughts on how to fix it)

The above both is, and is not, true (real life is usually a bit more complicated than that) but it was the best that I could manage & wanted to get the debate kicked off. In addition, some later spreadsheet-work (see bottom) indicates that it is more like 60% for the nations’ cities, and 100% for all the major conurbations. Now for the methodology of acquiring, plus full results that led to, the 40% claim…

A site maintained by The Maarssen Mapper contains a page of all UK Civil Parishes in the form of GPX file downloads. The top of each file has an XML header that looks like this (this one is Birchgrove_Community):—

… See full entry

This is a research document; it is going to attempt to explain:—

1. The fundamental basis on which Location, Search & Naming (LSN) facilities in OSM work
2. Why those facilities fail for a substantial part (40%) of the UK
3. How to fix it

You need to know that the writer has been mapping for only 5 months, and therefore only part-understands what he is talking about. One (possible) advantage is that his is a fresh eye, plus he has the ability to think for himself. As the writer enjoys stories, much of this will be presented in that form.

• Local government in England:(counties, districts and unitary authorities) (pdf)
• Local government in England:(Parish and town councils) (pdf)
• Counties, Non-metropolitan Districts and Unitary Authorities + GSS (ONS archive)

On Thursday 9 June 2016 I began to map outside of my home patch in Nottingham NG3 and met the Boundary marker which, since 1877, has marked the Boundary Line between the City of Nottingham and Gedling, and also between NG3 & NG4. I was now heading for Carlton, Gedling.

One feature that had been common throughout my NG3 mapping was that LSN had consistently failed with OSM. When I was mapping close to St Anns OSM said that I was in Thorneywood, and so on. By the time that I reached Carlton I’d gotten the basic map methods under my belt & could pay more attention to the condundrum of the fact that when I was working in Carlton (a Suburb) OSM said that I was in Bakersfield (at the time a Neighbourhood, but now a suburb), or even Thorneywood (another Neighbourhood).

Practical examples can focus the mind, and this post is typical. I placed the Diary arrow in Highfield Drive, Carlton, but the result was: “Location: Thorneywood, Sneinton, Nottingham, East Midlands, England, United Kingdom”, which isn’t even the correct District. That was just embarassing.

… See full entry

There has been an increased alertness to my changeset comments in recent weeks. I thought it reasonable, since I’m half-inventing words, to explain at greater length what on earth was going on.

I started mapping in March by entering house numbers & names onto the map & have continued doing that most days since. I’ve been using terracer within JOSM to do it, including associatedStreet relations for each house, something that terracer made easy. The team that maintain JOSM have been working hard to allow it to work under Java-8 (the dependency was previously on Java-7); however, many plugins (including terracer) are unmaintained and, as the chief developer informed me, they do not bother to check what effect their changes have upon any plugin.

Shortly after I started, version-32158 started crashing JOSM when certain options were selected and, shortly after, it was NOT possible to create a relation with terracer under any circumstances. That circumstance continues today, using the current-stable JOSM-10786 (terracer-32699).

This is how to create a new associatedStreet relation:

1. Select your street ways + all houses
2. From the menu, choose menu:Presets | Relations | Associated Street
3. From the dialog, Enter the name of the street
4. Press “New relation”
5. (house members should get a ‘house’ role, whilst the street ways get a ‘street’ role)

That was fine, and it worked, but I only knew how to create a new relation, and not how to add new members to an existing relation. Consequently, and especially with big roads, the number of relations for each road began to grow. I was fragging (fragmenting) the street relations.

Eventually, I discovered how to add new houses to an existing associatedStreet relation. This is how you do it:

… See full entry

(that’s a mixture of English & French lavender in the foreground)

One of the glories of English gardens is the astonishing abundance of flowers. Calverton Avenue was built by Gedling Pit in 1954 to provide housing for 80 employees. One of those houses today has the most beautiful and astonishing variety of flowers blooming under the August sun. The lady of the house was kind enough to allow me to photograph some of them. Here is a closer shot:—

… See full entry

I was going stir-crazy & got back onto the road to do some field-work in Valley Road, only to discover this:

(you may be more mature than me, but I found it funny; as a child I liked Warnor Bros cartoons way more than Disney)

I’m sorry to have to say that I found the 1930s detached & semi-detached houses in Valley Road & Prospect Road deeply boring. However, the residents were most helpful in helping me stem off dehydration by providing water + salt on request (both roads are on a hill & it was hot hot hot).

There were two interesting houses in Prospect Drive. This house board was made in Kenya:—

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

I’m in the middle of “Walking the Bounds” for Rushcliffe and need to find which Derbyshire ‘unnamed_shape’ (aka “non-civil parish”) is the one for Long Eaton (it is on the Rushcliffe border). That means ploughing through all those ‘unnamed_shapes’ in the list of Parish gpx. Whilst I do that I may as well document all the shapes:—

Overview:

See Also:

(council pdf) Districts + Parishes
Derbyshire 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 Derbyshire:

type=boundary
boundary=administrative: (on the relation grouping those ways)

admin_level=1: n/a
admin_level=2: (Border, external (with Irish Republic))
admin_level=3: n/a
admin_level=4: (Border, internal (with Wales/Scotland))
admin_level=5: Region is “East Midlands”
admin_level=6: County/Unitary_Authority is “Derbyshire, City of Derby”
admin_level=7: n/a
admin_level=8: Borough/District (eg Amber Valley District)
admin_level=9: n/a
admin_level=10: Parish (eg Alfreton CP)

Attribution:

source=OS_OpenData_BoundaryLine

Extra Tags:

designation=civil_parish
designation=non-civil_parish (OS designation for Unparished areas)
is_in:country=UK
is_in:region=East Midlands
is_in:county=Derbyshire
is_in:district=Amber Valley District
name:old=Hucknall Torkard CP
old_name=Hucknall Torkard CP
ref:gss=E04002838 (Government Statistical Service codes; this is Sawley; obtained from within the Parish GPX)
wikipedia=en:Alfreton

Unnamed Shapes Named:

Q: When is a Civil Parish not a Parish?
A1: When it is a Non-Civil Parish
A2: When it is a Municipal Borough or an Urban District

… See full entry

zarl made a comment saying that he “enjoyed my nicely illustrated mapping adventures”. The last photos that I took were 3 weeks ago, because I use Mapillary to store the photos & their site had become dog-slow after an upgrade (it seems to have improved now, so I can stop my desktop surveying & restart doing it on the ground again soonish).

So, here for zarl are a couple of new photos from previous sessions. The first above was taken at Car Wash Factory on Cavendish Road in Carlton, and looks halfway decent at full-screen. One of the things that I find interesting in this is the way that both men in the photo know that they are being photographed (it took a couple of minutes, as I struggled to get the framing correct) but studiously behave as if that was not happening. Natural actors!

… See full entry

I set out the neat arrangement for admin_level=* admin tags for BoundaryLines in a recent post on Nottingham Civil Parishes. I thought that I had discovered a discrepancy when I hit the bureaucratic inventions of Yorkshire and the Humber + North Lincolnshire, but maybe not.

Here is the relevant snippet:

Admin Tags for Nottinghamshire:

type=boundary
boundary=administrative: (on way and/or on relation grouping those ways)

admin_level=1: n/a
admin_level=2: (Border, external (with Irish Republic))
admin_level=3: n/a
admin_level=4: (Border, internal (with Wales/Scotland))
admin_level=5: Region is “East Midlands”
admin_level=6: Unitary_Authority/County is “City of Nottingham/Nottinghamshire”
admin_level=7: n/a
admin_level=8: Borough/District (eg Rushcliffe District)
admin_level=9: n/a
admin_level=10: Parish (eg Alverton CP)

The heart of the issue for OSM was that North Lincolnshire was originally listed as a County (admin_level=6), whereas it’s modern designation is as a Unitary Authority Area. I’ve changed it’s admin_level to ‘8’, although I fully understand why the previous author would have put it as a county, but it is not.

2016-Aug-16: Correction to above; although the OS provide Unitary Authority .shape files together with Borough and District .shape files, the UA is listed under OSM as admin_level=6. My bad.

The ancient arrangement (current in my youth) was that Yorkshire was divided into 3 Ridings: North, West & East. The East Riding was bounded by the Humber in the south, whilst Lincolnshire was bounded by the Humber in the North. Thus, both counties were separated by a mighty river, and both parties were most pleased by that fact. Then, in 1974, bureaucratic barbarians decided to take an axe to the country’s ancient counties and imposed Humberside upon both parties + built a bridge to connect them. Hmm. Humberside lasted until 1992 and we ended up with the current arrangement.

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas + Dinnington St. John’s CP Repaired + Renamed)

Bassetlaw district

I’ve acquired a taste for renewing boundary lines. It consists of (what I call) “Walking the Bounds” (in plain-speak, following a boundary upon the OSM map in JOSM, either clockwise or widdershins) and, together with the appropriate OS_BoundaryLine checking that the existing boundary is accurate for 2016. I’ve just completed doing that for Bassetlaw. It took 2 days and was a horrible experience.

Much of Bassetlaw had already been corrected to the OS, but the rest required the necessary nips‘n’tucks to bring it back into good order. That was good fun; I enjoy the feeling of bringing the map into good order. Folks in the past did the best that they could with the tools & equipment available at that time. We have much better references & tools now, and especially with the government’s astonishing OpenData declaration and the subsequent data releases from Ordnance Survey.

I also took the time to correct the multiple variants on source=OS_OpenData_BoundaryLine. I also found that great fun (I’m deeply anal). However, it still took a full-time 2-day slog (we are talking 12-hour days here) and was far more difficult than it needed to be… The Bassetlaw.gpx is 154.9km which is big, but should hardly represent 2-days of breaking your bones against unnecessary obstacles… The point here is that, once again, I kept coming up against situations in which the admin BoundaryLine had been merged with a river, or a road, or a field boundary, or a wood, or a… gaah…

<rant>

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

I mentioned in Repairs to Woodsetts CP Boundary that Dinnington St. John’s CP was involved in the same cartographic atrocity within a Woodsetts field that had afflicted Woodsetts CP, and needed repairing for the same reason. It also needed a rename as it had been wrongly called Dinnington St. John’s TC.

Dinnington St. John’s has been given a full, laborious & time-consuming set of nip‘n’tucks in order to convert it from a boundary based on NPE maps to one based on 2016 OS_BoundaryLines. The old parish line was always 10s of metres from true. Some of the lines were 100s of metres from true; only the name in the tags window helped me hold on to the view that I was still dealing with the correct BoundaryLine. I ended up needing to use Letwell CP.gpx, Firbeck CP.gpx + Dinnington St. John’s CP.gpx (watch out for the unescaped apostrophe) downloads.

It’s only a small parish (21.3km) but has a tremendous number of small-scale twists, turns & dog-legs. It had also ended up with a rogue, unused way within the relation due to the earlier atrocity.

This is Dinnington St John’s parish

Spam #1: (gone spam 1…) (Indian films, which launches sub-sites without asking; turkish launch page)
Spam #2: (gone spam 2…) Facebook restaurant spam

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

Woodsetts appeared on my screen (literally & metaphorically) whilst entering the very wonderful Worksop Unparished parish on to the OSM map. The northern edge of Worksop parish that I was working on (pun deliberate) was at the southern edge of Woodsetts CP. However, the Woodsetts parish line seemed to be 200m or more adrift from it’s true place.

‘CP’ is short for “Civic Parish”, and is the smallest of the English Administrative boundaries (admin_level=10). Woodsetts CP was entered before my OSM time, in the days when one of the few bits of reference material available was NPE maps. Now, I understand fully that “something is better than nothing” (I already have that attitude to Bing imagery), but when I see “source=NPE” I have now come to expect wild inaccuracies. And am rarely disappointed, with Woodsetts CP as my current example.

Woodsetts Road is a tertiary highway that runs north out of Woodsetts village. After a short distance it meets Acorn Lodge and changes into Gilding Wells Road; to the East of that road is a farmer’s field that contains the site of a Cartographic atrocity!

One of the parishes to the north of Woodsetts is Dinnington St. John’s. Did you spot the single quote in that name? Well, unfortunately csmale did not. URLs within his Parish page use single quotes as delimiters within HTML <a href=...> syntax, but have not themselves been encoded, which means that the Dinnington St. John’s link is ineffective. It should be http://csmale.dev.openstreetmap.org/os_boundaryline/parish_region\Rotherham_District\Dinnington_St._John's_CP.gpx (which will work in a browser or JOSM). However, in html page source the quote (‘'’) should have been rendered as ‘%27’ (so-called “percent encoding”) (this also normally applies to spaces, but all spaces have already been transformed to underscores (‘_’)).

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

It’s vital to have your UK civil parish area entered in the map if you want your house and/or locality to be easily found by the search & location aspects of OSM. However, many areas of the country are Unparished, and that includes 9 distinct areas in Nottinghamshire (12 towns). The Ordnance Survey have provided shape files for every parish, and that includes the Unparished parishes. However, each of the latter is unnamed. Before I did the research, none of the Nottinghamshire Unparished parishes were on the map. They are now!

Worksop is one of the last Unparished parishes waiting to be added to the map, and Unnamed_shape_5619 shows the boundary under JOSM. In contrast to all the others it seemed to be the easiest, as it needed the least editing. However, right at the end it threw a little wobbly.

Part of the northern edge of the 5619 boundary ran up Worksop Road (A57) then turned right along an unclassified road and Owday Lane. In contrast to all of the other 37km of the boundary, this little length along the unclassified + Owday Lane had no other boundary line already on it. That smelt all wrong.

A couple of hundred metres north of this unpopulated line was a way with a dozen or so boundaries in it, running parallel to Owday Lane through the middle of woods:-

1. Nottinghamshire (Ceremonial); (vice_county); (administrative admin_level=6 (County))
2. South Yorkshire (Ceremonial)
3. East Midlands (administrative admin_level=5 (Region))
4. Yorkshire and the Humber (administrative admin_level=5 (Region))
5. Bassetlaw (administrative admin_level=8 (District))
6. Rotherham (administrative admin_level=8 (Unitary_Authority))
7. North and South Anston CP (administrative admin_level=10 (Parish))
8. Woodsetts CP (administrative admin_level=10 (Parish))

… See full entry

(see also Nottinghamshire Civil Parishes - names for unnamed areas)

What fun (not) this is.

A fantastic amount of work has already been put into the OSM map by masses of folks in the past. In this diary entry I document myself trampling all over some of their work and (hopefully) leaving all the good bits intact as I make nips & tucks to correct some errors introduced from NPE maps & stuff in the past in addition to adding a hole (which is what, in effect, an unparished parish is).

The source material for these edits is csmale’s GPX downloads derived from the 2016 OS .shape files. Those include the latest corrections to all UK BoundaryLines.

I’m absolutely terrified when editing these sorts of things! By the nature of Boundary Lines there can be several boundaries within the same line. In OSM a boundary is established as a Relation. That relation’s members are the ways that constitute the totality of the boundary. There are 6 different levels of administrative boundary, from Border, external (admin_level=2) (with the Irish Republic) down to the Civic Parish (CP) (admin_level=10). By the nature of it, each lower level consists of sub-divisions within the larger boundary that is the level above it.

Then it swiftly gets more complicated. There are also Ceremonial boundaries (I have zero idea as to the difference between it & an Administrative boundary). And there are others, some of which — in my darker moments — I begin to think have been invented, just for malicious fun.

To illustrate, here is a current tally of boundaries within the area that I started at, at a spot where both Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire County boundaries meet Warsop CP (southern tip):

… See full entry

Serendipity allowed me to be in the right spot at the right time to catch a troupe of Travellers as they began to setup their Summer Fair on the fields above the Carlton Richard Herrod Centre:

… See full entry

The world is discovering how easy it is to spam OSM. These are the latest:

(gone spam 1) …leading to an inspiring talk on “Become a Respected Leader of the Good and Easy” (zero application to OSM; just more spam)

(gone spam2) …leading to an inspiring webpage on Jeep - it’s natural agate (Round trips organized fun days possible integration of ATV trips rural romantic campfire meals around the campfire gourmet meals)

(many thanks to admin + mods for removing these users)