Cheltenham is a town of 116,000 people in south-west England. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, I spent lots of time collecting addresses in the town and adding them to the map.

Cheltenham is now better mapped than parts of London and many other cities and towns. If I can do it, you can do it too—and better still, you can learn from my experience and mistakes.

Why?

Address coverage in OpenStreetMap is still poor in many places. Good coverage is needed for better geocoding, which many users view as an integral part of a modern map.

During lockdown, many people relied on deliveries. Even now, a huge amount of time is wasted not so much in “last mile” delivery issues but “last few hundred metres” ones.

UK address data is not open, so addresses have to be surveyed or collected on the ground. This is tedious and repetitive, but there are some upsides. You’ll uncover mistakes in places which haven’t been touched on OpenStreetMap for years, and you’ll have the opportunity to improve geometry and alignment with the far better imagery now available.

Walking around your town or city is a great way of discovering new places and learning more about local history. Like many people, I’d heard of the mass trespass of Kinder Scout and how it ultimately led to greater access to the countryside. But I was unaware of earlier agitations here in Cheltenham over access to Leckhampton Hill. The hill is now part of the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, crossed by the Cotswold Way National Trail which passes a memorial tree for one of the rioters.

Approach

I started collecting addresses in earnest in mid-April 2020, continuing to August 2021. I collected addresses at least once per week but usually more. I’d walk for anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours at a time.

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A section of the Cotswold Way National Trail on Leckhampton Hill was recently improved to make it suitable for off-road Tramper wheelchairs and mobility scooters.

The path has been widened and resurfaced:

Steps where the path meets Hartley Lane have been replaced with a ramp:

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For months I’ve been mapping addresses in Cheltenham, England. I recently discovered the JOSM “Coloured Streets” style. It has improved my address mapping and might help you too.

The style shows streets and all the buildings and address nodes “on” them in the same colour. This makes it easy to spot buildings tagged with the wrong addr:street at a glance. It also clearly shows buildings with addr:housenumber or addr:housename (you must enable the latter in the settings) but no addr:street. (The JOSM validator checks for this too, but with Coloured Streets you can see the problem immediately.)

In this example, Ashcombe House, Outwoods, and Beechwood are in pink and therefore have an addr:street of Stanley Road, when they should be on Ashley Road. The mistake would not be obvious otherwise.

If you look near the bottom right of this screenshot, you can see Windsor Street shown in orange:

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The need for addresses

One of the things that often comes up in discussions about OpenStreetMap is poor address coverage in some places.

Rightly or wrongly, to many people a map is now no longer just a 2D representation of our environment. Searching and navigation/routing, despite being separate services, are viewed as part of a map, and almost as important as the visual map itself. We need good address coverage to improve geocoding.

Adding addresses really improves the map, and that’s what keeps me going with it. When I explained what I was doing to one person who approached me, he said “that’s a good idea mate, Google Maps shows my house all the way down the end of the road”. I also saw a food delivery driver pull up outside a house and ask “is it called Gate House?”. (On OpenStreetMap it is ☺)

Chancel Way or Chancel Park?

Recently I collected addresses on Chancel Way in Charlton Kings, Cheltenham. When adding them, I noticed something that didn’t seem right.

The road was split into Chancel Way and Chancel Park. At first glance, this seems fine. Having a common prefix like this is common in UK residential street names. (For example, Croft Road, Croft Gardens, Croft Drive, and Croft Avenue are nearby.)

The house numbering suggested that Chancel Way and Chancel Park were actually a single street. Following the street west, the first number on the left (south) side of Chancel Park was 19, and the next number was 21. This fits with the final odd number on Chancel Way (17). Even numbers on the right (north) side of the street match too.

More research

There are no results for Chancel Park on the Royal Mail postcode finder, yet it appears on Apple Maps (via DuckDuckGo):

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