More on Public Houses, Insane Asylums & Cholera

Another Diary as part of mapping Nottingham’s Creative Quarter.

Continuing the joyful themes of my last Diary, which contemplated the Duke of Devonshire (Public House), the General Lunatic Asylum (Dakeyne Street and now closed, the inmates having transferred in Victorian times to Nottingham Borough Lunatic Asylum) and, finally, the 1832 Cholera outbreak that lead to both St. Mary’s Rest Garden and the explosion of humanity as it flooded out of Nottingham Town and (initially) into St. Ann’s.

Above is The Vine Public House, and the first in recent times that we have met that is both historic and still trading.

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Above is a small panaroma of some of the buildings that currently front part of Carlton Road close to Nottingham town centre. Behind the camera is the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Sneinton whilst in front of the camera is the (relatively recent) ecclesiastical parish of St Luke, which is within the Civil Parish of St. Ann’s (which, for the sake of accuracy no longer exists, since it is subsumed into the Unitary Authority City of Nottingham, but does still exist as the political St. Ann’s Ward).

I live in St. Ann’s (although my neighbours call it Thorneywood) and was amazed moving here at the number of:

1. Religious places (churches, mosques, temples)
2. Public Houses (‘pubs’ — drinking establishments)
3. Psychiatric Institutions

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Moderators refuse to remove a spammer selling pot

Early this morning there were so many spammers from China trying to flog devices to crack ATMs that it filled up an entire page + half of the next page (~30 posts, multiple usernames, but likely same/small cadre of spammers). At the end of a bunch of reports I reverted to “just look for the entry ‘wftg’ at the end of each diary”.

About 10 hours later I reported a spammer for the third (or possibly the fourth) time for trying to sell pot. The diary moderators have refused to remove him. I’m afraid that I lost my rag with this one:–

Why has this spammer been left in place; is he related to you?

There is a spam-link in his profile. His a/c was created on the same day that he created the profile spam-link + diary so that the SEs will also list his profile. Are you in his pay? That is the only reason that I can think of for not removing this user.

Autopsy

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Useful Links:

• 2019 Ward Boundaries (Nottingham Open Data)
• Nottingham Polling Stations datasets
• All Nottingham Open Data datasets
• HowTo map Ward Boundaries
• Wiki page on OGR

1. Aspley Ward
2. Basford Ward
3. Berridge Ward
4. Bestwood Ward
5. Bilborough Ward
6. Bulwell Ward
7. Bullwell Forest Ward
8. Castle Ward
9. Clifton East Ward
10. Clifton West Ward
11. Dales Ward
12. Hyson Green & Arboretum Ward
13. Leen Valley Ward
14. Lenton & Wollaton East Ward
15. Mapperley Ward
16. Meadows Ward
17. Radford Ward
18. Sherwood Ward
19. St Ann’s Ward
20. Wollaton West Ward

A useful call-back for me today from Wendy Conibear at the GIS Team in Nottingham City Council (many thanks, Wendy).

Like most cities in the UK, the City of Nottingham is a Unitary Authority (a government measure enacted in 1992 which removed the former multi-tier arrangement of Parish/District/County Councils and which in OSM has led to multiple holes in the administrative map, since no-one can agree how to drag UK admin mapping into the 21st Century) (40% of all UK parishes are Unitary Authorities, which means that they do not appear on the map as there is no accepted mapping for them; that is a dumb position to allow to occur).

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3 x Recording Studios, Hipster Art Galleries inside an old warehouse, a hack-space (3d-printing, computers, carpentry + lathes, available for all but oh! so secret, invitation only) and so on & on, all in one day - you will perhaps understand why I've the Council has coined the name The Creative Quarter†.

After a little backfill the day began with a single block, in which the first buildings were (what appears to be) a closed-down Persian-cuisine restaurant + the first Recording Studio.

Aberdeen Street + Carlton Road

Pistachio seems to be closed, and I suspect that the 5 flats above it are unused as well.

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On the other side of Longden Street to Allan Joyce Architects, the subject of my previous Diary, is H3 Performance, a Fitness Centre ensconced within a large former warehouse:–

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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.

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The “largest Rolls-Royce funeral fleet in the world”

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This used to be the 1869 William Bancroft Building, pictured above showing the former main entrance on the corner of Robin Hood Street and Roden Street.

The building is close enough to Nottingham City Centre that the legendary Robin Hood would have been able to easily hit the walls of the town with his arrow whilst standing on the steps of the building. Of course, when those steps were built those city walls no longer existed, but then neither did Robin Hood, so let’s just pass on.

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The last bit of Stonebridge Park was mapped yesterday. The City Farm is NOT part of that district but I took the opportunity to walk some of the paths & take some pictures so that you could go “Ooh look! Middle-aged horses close to some houses!”.

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Stonebridge Road is an otherwise unnoteworthy road in Nottingham NG3. It came to my attention back in April 2016 when I tried to get some opendata from the local GIS department. I pointed out that Central Government had told the Ordnance Survey to share their data publically (giving all relevant links) but, in spite of them also committing themselves to sharing public data, the GIS dept said they “would not be permitted by Ordnance Survey as this would basically be providing people with a copy of their product”. The triangle of what is now known as “Stonebridge Park” thus remained a white spot until recently when finally we got some satellite imagery that could show it. Mostly (some houses are still not on those tiles).

Having spent March 21 mapping much of it here are a couple of features.

The estate was redeveloped as a Radburn Design in the 1970s from former Victorian housing and, whilst many of those 1970s houses were demolished in the 2010s, the street layout was largely kept. The council tried to make some improvements. Here are some of the new houses in Jersey Gardens:–

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• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

Well, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?

In the intro I pointed out what had kept me prevaricating & not surveying for 22 months.

Next was the discovery that OSMTracker v0.7 was utter tosh since it would not produce viable tracks on my phone.

Next was that in addition v0.7 also had most GPS missing from the photos, and that diary was a howTo Fix the Photos, putting GPS back into them.

Finally this diary sees me re-install OSMTracker v0.6.11 and go out tracking recently-built houses within Stonebridge Estate on March 21. There were a number of discoveries:–

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• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

After installing OSMTracker v0.7 on my Android SmartPhone on the Ides of March, then using it the next day for the first time, I discovered that not only did it not track (a touch of an existential issue for a GPS Tracker - how come no-one noticed that before?) but photos taken with the App also were lacking almost all GPS info within the metadata, making them useless for Mapillary.

 ~/DCIM/Camera$ identify -verbose IMG_20190316_092818.jpg | fgrep GPS
exif:GPSAltitudeRef: 240/100
exif:GPSInfo: 686

It was a short session and only 43 photos, but I did not want to waste them if it could be helped. Somewhere in my searching I came across two really old plugins for JOSM which worked to fix that absence:

• Plugin: photo_geotagging
• Plugin: photoadjust
• Wiki: photomapping techniques
• Wiki: photomapping within JOSM
• Wiki: Geotagging Source Photos (old)

How to Add Geo-tags into Photos within JOSM

My phone is a cheap model from Vodaphone (SmartPrime-7, model VFD 600, Andoid 6.0.1) and has been able to add a full set of GPS tags to the photos that it takes with the built-in utility from the get-go, let alone when using OSMTracker. Even so, after taking photos under OSMTracker-0.7 and exporting a GPX (track-file), even though the gpx contained lat/long/compass for each photo, the photos themselves did not.

April update: Location needs to be switched on for BOTH the smartphone and the camera. They are independent actions within my model.

Step-by-step

Inside JOSM:–

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• Info
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos tl;dr:
  •Do not use v0.7 of OSMTracker, since it will not track
  •It is not enough to switch Location ON within your smartphone before tracking, you also need to switch Location ON for the camera, else no GPS metadata.

I’ve made use of OSMTracker v0.6.11 since starting surveying for OSM on 21 March, 2016. It does not do a lot (GPS track, take GPS-located photos + voice notes), but it does them simply, easily & well and — more to the point — in my opinion that is pretty much all that you need whilst surveying.

There is just one thing that I would like to see added to OSMTracker, and that is for the GPS direction (probably GPSImgDirection) to be added to photo’s exif. That would allow Mapillary to know which direction the camera was pointing in when the photo was taken, which would assist it’s processing of the photos after being uploaded.

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• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

On a day in May 2017 2 crack-heads† tried to kill me as I was mapping. They failed, I dialled 999, the police attended & in the end decided to ignore it (no CCTV, and the police sergeant claiming a lack of resources to investigate).

I guess that it is simple middle-class naivety on my part but I was profoundly affected by what I thought of as the refusal of the police to defend me.

The UK government has taken away the right to bear arms from all except the police, military & criminals (thank you Tony Blair). A former member of the Territorial Army that I know was recently asked to help clear his parent-in-law’s house following her death and discovered viable pistols + shotguns in the attic. He took the pistols back to his house and shortly afterwards was descended upon by the police. I counted 15 police at one stage standing around chatting outside his house + an unknown number inside. The whole palaver went on all night until the next morning, including police film-crews with portable floodlights conducting interviews outside the house with other police. The entire family is now in shock & clearly suffering from PTSD.

I had a touch of PTSD myself for the next 19 months, spending most of my time after the crack-head incident inside my house. I certainly could not face any surveying. In the end it was obvious that I had to drag myself up by the bootstraps and do something — in effect, re-boot myself.

Some little leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan were most useful but I was almost out of them. So, I spent time updating those promotional OSM leaflets and getting them printed.

Whilst huddled in my burrow Mapillary had spent it’s time vandalising my photos, all 6,200 of them. So, I spent time attempting to undo the damage using their blur editor. They ignored all my work.

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Above is one of the final of the set of photos taken May 8, 2017, within the edge of a stand of wild trees looking north-west towards the ruins of Chase Farm. It is close to a ridge of high ground which runs from Nottingham (to the South-West) towards the North-East, which is on the other side of the Farm, and which today is called “Mapperley Plains”. Only 150 years ago it was full of trees and was called “Sherwood Forest” (yes, that Sherwood Forest), was originally owned by the King and renowned for The Chase.

I’ve finally added all the stuff I surveyed back in 2017 to the map, and will very soon be free to begin mapping again after a gap of 2 years. The bypass whose development you can just see on the LHS is one of the things that needs mapping.

Hope you like the photo.

Update 23 June 2022

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Lime Tree Gardens Soakaway (map)

This is the second time that I’ve come across a Flood Lagoon (the far-more-impressive first time was back on 20 June 2016 with the Carlton Foxhill Road Central Flood Prevention Lagoon. Thanks to lots of help provided on that First Contact, and after a phone call with Nav today (“my name is ‘Nav‘, like ‘SatNav’”) I’ve also got the inside skinny from Severn Trent on this one. And it is complicated…

There is a rectangle of grass (map) that encloses the whole thing:–

• landuse = grass

3 sides have a metre-high fence (map):–

• use menu: Highways|Barriers|Fence

The man-made structure that you can see in the centre of that photo above is two outlet pipes for a culvert that conducts surface water from the nearby estate’s roads into the soakaway:–

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• Intro
• Installation
• Mapping Buildings :: Startup
• Mapping Buildings :: Basics on using building_tools + terracer
• Mapping Buildings :: More Advanced

BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)

In the previous post I showed the basic steps of using the building_tools and terracer plugins together to map buildings with JOSM on to the OSM map, so make sure to read that if you get lost at all during this post. This section will give a pot-pouri of how to perform more advanced tasks using the same two plugins. It will start with 2 Bradstone Drive.

Drawing an L-Shaped Detached House

For some reason these are very common in England (this particular house is a 2-story modern house — built in the last 5 years — but bungalows in this style have been built like that since the ’20s). As a detached house, adding the L-shape can be done either before or after using terracer, but for all other houses any changes to the basic rectangle of a terrace must only be done after terracing the building.

1. Draw the main frontage of the building, using (in this case) Esri World Imagery as a template
2. Press ‘s’ and select the building just drawn
3. Press ‘b’ and place the X-hairs above the common corner-node for both frontages and click
4. As you now draw the side frontage, the mouse is shaping a box anchored on the common corner node.
5. Shape the new box to the side-frontage, and click when complete
   (There are now 2 building rectangles positioned over all external borders of the house)
6. Press Shift+j
   (“Join overlapping areas”)
7. Remove the redundant nodes from 2 sides of the house
   (there are likely to be 2 nodes on top of each other on each side to be removed)

That’s it - an L-shaped house. A similar procedure can be performed for buildings with rear-extensions, etc.

Drawing Twin Garages

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• Intro
• Installation
• Mapping Buildings :: Startup
• Mapping Buildings :: Basics on using building_tools + terracer
• Mapping Buildings :: More Advanced

BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)

Nottingham City Council maintain an Adopted Highways Register which is fantastic for confirming both adopted & un-adopted streets local to me + house-numbers and, on occasion, housenames. The info comes from Ordnance Survey and therefore has a Crown Copyright. Because of that, it is important that I point out that I use the site to confirm my earlier survey results, rather than copying from it.

Adopted Highways register
A highway and a public right of way mean the same thing; they are both a “way” over which the public have a right to pass and repass at all times of the day and night. The term highway includes all carriageways (roads), streets, footways (pavements), footpaths, bridleways and byways. A highway may also include the adjacent verges.

This site shows which highways are adopted. If a highway is adopted it means it is maintained and repaired by Nottingham City Council. It also shows public rights of way (footpaths, bridleways and byways) both adopted and un-adopted which are recorded on the Definitive Map and Statement. This is the legal record of public rights of way in Nottingham at the time the Map and Statement were last updated (the “relevant date”).

You will therefore understand that the above is also the legal status that allows OSM surveyors in the UK to both survey and photograph from those highways anything that they can see.

Map Attitude

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• Intro
• Installation
• Mapping Buildings :: Startup
• Mapping Buildings :: Basics on using building_tools + terracer
• Mapping Buildings :: More Advanced

One of the keys to using JOSM is to teach yourself to use the keyboard at the same time as you use the mouse. Once you have a small selection of keyboard shortcuts in your head things will go much quicker.

BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)

2 mins tutorial: Drawing Buildings in JOSM
(from the HOT team; a little old, but still accurate)

Most of my time post-survey is spent mapping houses & roads - it is rare that a road is not already mapped, though naturally they always need checking and sometimes correcting. In contrast, it is rare in the areas that I survey that any houses are mapped at all.

Startup Sequence

Here is an account of my current startup sequence after launching JOSM from *menu | Education | JOSM (latest snapshot):–

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