Where the streets have no name: Coach Road Estate, Washington

Serlby Close, Usworth. The houses on the left are part of Coach Road Estate
Source: © Alex McGregor at Geograph CC-BY-SA-2.0

Microsoft, like a number of other large tech firms, now has teams working to improve OpenStreetMap. A couple of weeks ago they turned their attention to the UK, and asked about some roads apparently missing street names.

I checked a few of these examples using available Open Data sources, primarily those of the Ordnance Survey. For the most part, our existing mapping seems correct: there is no official street name. Many were places like caravan parks and industrial estates, but one really stood out. This was an area on the north side of Washington, County Durham called Coach Road Estate. As I investigated it soon became apparent that the estate is interesting for other reasons too.

City Stripping : building historical road layouts from todays data

Street map of Buenos Aires 1895 (plano de Basch)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

For at least one year I have been thinking about the best way to create vector streetmaps for different historical periods for the same city. The basic principle is simple: take the existing street layout and remove what is new! Essentially, this presumes that any current vector data will be more precise than digitising vectors from old maps.

I have even given the process a name: "City Stripping", but in practice my attempts so far have been less successful than I hoped. I think that  I kept too much existing OpenStreetMap data in my first attempts, because in practice I found it easier to re-trace the old data (as here for Tartu/Dorpat).

Editing historical road layouts : Persistence in the Urban Landscape 3

It's a while since I've written a post on the theme of persistence in urban landscapes, and this despite covering some additional examples in my talk at SotM13 in Birmingham. This post takes one example I included in that talk: how road layouts persist.

However, I have also used it as a convenient hook to discuss how we might enable the capture of such data for something like OHM (Open Historical Map). I hope the latter discussion might provoke further ideas from those interested in developing OHM and both links with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata in the future.

Derby Road, Nottingham

Current OSM Map of Derby Road compared with
Sanderson's Map of 1835. Changes in alignment marked with arrows

I've touched on the history of Derby Road before. Here I'll show what I know of it's history in detail from around 1800. The key point is that the basic line of the road has changed very little: the major changes being well understood and mostly comprehensively documented by the Lenton Local History Society.