New Year footpath mapping with Mappa Mercia near the Fauld Crater

My first countryside excursion of 2014 was to investigate a man-made hole. For 2015 I choose a different bigger hole which I've meant to visit for a long time: the Fauld Crater. What was different this year is that we made it an OpenStreetMap mapping and social event!

Mapping footpaths for OpenStreetMap near the Fauld Crater, East Staffordshire

I'd mentioned at our last pub meeting of the year that I fancied doing some footpath mapping between Christmas & the New Year. Coincidentally Rob Nickerson of Mappa Mercia asked if we were organising anything after Christmas. So the idea of 2 or 3 of us getting together grew to the notion of linking up with Mappa Mercia. So in the end the meeting had quite a diverse set of goals:

• Do some mapping together
• Walk and map unmapped footpaths
• An excuse for a post-Christmas walk
• Link up socially with Mappa Mercia
• Initiate another type of OSM activity in the (East) Midlands

OpenStreetMap Nottingham goes to Derby

I've been very remiss in not reporting recent OSM Nottingham pub meetings.

Part of the idea of this blog was to give people a feel for what goes on at such meetings and who comes along, so this is definitely a failure on my part. (I should add that in the absence of simple social aspects directly implemented on the main OSM site, keeping the basic communications to keep people informed of these meetings is harder work than it should be, and when I'm busy with other things I tend to miss channels out or send reminders out too close to the event).

OSMers in Exeter Arms
(will_p, wja, Karen & MatSmith, blackadder and ChrisClemson)
Image courtesy of wja rights reserved

For some time, in fact before we went to Worksop to link up with the HOT Hack team, we've talked about changing the venue from time-to-time in the hope of making it easier for mappers elsewhere in the East Midlands to join us. Derby always seemed an obvious choice both because we know a number of mappers who live and work in Derby and because it's pretty accessible (I can reach the centre of Derby in 20 minutes by bus, only marginally shorter than the time to get to Nottingham City Centre, and 10 times further).

Mix of local OSM folk and HOT hackers at Worksop, Sept 2013.
(Wonderchook, harrywood, IknowJoseph, bigfatfrog, FranBoon and others)

Consulting with the pub experts in the OSM Nottingham crowd gave two suggestions for a place close to the centre of Derby and handy both for buses and trains: the Brewery Tap and the Exeter Arms. I plumped for the Exeter Arms as from the descriptions by William and Andy it sounded a very attractive pub. The only downside of Derby is that two of the city's busiest mappers (Paul The Archivist and Rovastar) work in London these days.

When this meeting was announced on the talk-gb list Dudley Ibbet intimated he'd come along. I missed most of Dudley's talk at SotM in Birmingham, but did have a chance to chat to him later. Like Andy (SomeoneElse), Dudley is a stalwart mapper of footpaths. As I have rejuvenated my own interest in mapping footpaths, it seemed likely that footpaths would figure in our pub conversation.

Coincidentally, I'd done a bit of mapping about 10 days before on one of those wet and windy days which have been so common in Britain this winter. I'd hoped to meet up with some Botanist friends, but I think they'd not been brave enough to venture out. I had a short walk at Charnwood Lodge National Nature Reserve along a footpath and in some access land. An hour was about as long as I wanted to stay out: I found some nice lichens and a few plant galls:

Obligatory photo of something biological to accompany blog post on footpaths :-)
Podetia of a Cladonia lichen.

I chose a route back which wandered along country roads (the M1 had been pretty windy anyway) with the aim of noting as many footpath signs as I could. I started passing through the industrial town of Shepshed and managed to add a large number of pubs which distressingly were missing from OSM. When I came to update OSM with the information I'd collected I realised lots of the paths were on the map and had been mapped by a single user MatSmith, they just had not used the designation tag to provide the information which I'd been using to find missing footpaths. A little later in the week I noted a footpath somewhere else also mapped by Mat. For some reason I'd never noticed his contributions before: now I realised we had another major footpath mapper relatively close by. I took the obvious action and sent him a message about our meeting in Derby.

For the day I updated my comparison of PRoW data from rowmaps and OSM for Notts, Derbys and Leics. with the addition of a background layer from OS OpenData Meridian to make it a bit easier to locate things (I had this data readily available in PostGIS, so easier to do than titivate OSM data). Naturally footpaths did get talked about, but the realisation that my comparison was seriously inadequate for much of Leicestershire because of MatSmith's mapping, means I'm not publishing the latter map. I have however been working on some way in which we can highlight missing footpath data as a background layer for OSM editors without encouraging tracing from sources fraught with copyright problems.

Each orange dot shows where a PRoW meets an OSM highway which is not a track or path
(area is NE Leicestershire). PRoWs are shown with OS OpenData Meridian 2 layer for context.
Contains Ordnance Survey Open Data Crown copyright and database right 2012.

A couple of other topics came up:

• Chris Clemson was asking about rendering tiles and running a web server. I've done this on a small scale on a local system with oldish infrastructure so was able to tell him about that side of things, but I've never tried with renderd which manages rendering according to user requests rather than blindly generating the whole tile set. TileMill of course provides a fairly easy to use way of generating a tile set, but I haven't tried to build my own viewer. I may have to get to grips with this for building FHRS tiles.
• Andy (blackadder) talked about the possibility of having an OpenStreetMap Midlands gathering. This would probably be a day-time event in the Summer. Places like Stoke-on-Trent and Cannock Chase came up in discussions. Both are reasonably equally accessible from Birmingham and Nottingham/Derby (what Jones the Planner calls Brian Clough City) and are not so well mapped. Personally I'd be interested to visit Cannock Chase.

All-in-all a very profitable meet-up.

Upside. We had a really good turn out. It was great of Mat(t) and Karen to join us at short notice and also very nice that Blackadder came up from the MappaMercia crowd. So out of the 9 of us, 5 were joining us for the first time. Definitely coming back to Derby (in May).

The downside. The Exeter Arms is a great pub with lots of neat little rooms and what looks like good food (albeit a bit fancy: pubs which serve coffee with shortbread biscuits shaped like bones dipped in chocolate are hardly ordinary boozers):

You don't just get a biscuit with our teas & coffee's, you get a shortbread bone dipped in chocolate. Fancy a coffee? pic.twitter.com/aAHhXariD5
— The Exeter Arms (@exeterarms) March 1, 2014

unfortunately this meant it was very busy and the kitchen was maxed out! We probably need a slightly quieter venue!

June Nottingham OpenStreetMap Pub meet-up

A mix of late 19th/early 20th century terraced houses
on Foxhall Street, Forest Fields, Nottingham.
At the S end there are substantial villas near The Forest itself.

  After a hiatus of two years I decided it was time for another pub meet-up in Nottingham. 

We followed the formula from the past: an hour of mapping before adjourning to the pub. I've set dates for the next few months: the next meeting is on Tuesday 9th July.

Here's what we got up to in June. 

Leafy St Ann's : pre-pub mapping

Despite it being just after Easter and the date being announced with only a weeks notice, there were 6 of us at the second OSM pub meet-up. This time we met at the Lincolnshire Poacher on Mansfield Road: definitely a pub worth of the real_ale=yes tag.

With lighter evenings it seemed worth doing a bit of mapping before having a drink: also a good opportunity to show people the ropes. I chose the Poacher, not just because its a nice pub with good beer, but because there are quite a few places in the immediate vicinity which could do with more map survey work. These include the Arboretum, Church Cemetery, also known as the Rock Cemetery and residential areas either side of Mansfield Road.

I'd done a bit of preparation for each of these, but once I realised that there'd be enough of us I persuaded people to visit St Ann's. Although this inner city area has a poor reputation I knew a decent route, and it offered a much more varied insight into the issues associated with collecting data for OSM.


The main mapping objective in this area was to fix roads with missing or, possibly, incorrect names. I had made a print out (see above, and here registration required) from ITO OSM Analysis which provided the basis of a reasonable hours mapping. We walked a loop down behind Huntingdon Street, along St Ann's Well Road and then along the tree-lined walks of Robin Hood Chase, Corporation Oaks, and Elm Walk back to the pub.

St. Ann's is predominantly 1970s and early 1980s social housing: the area having been re-developed as part of a slum clearance programme. It was planned with a 'Radburn' layout : lots of cul-de-sacs and interconnecting walkways. Addressing and street names are really confusing as we immediately found out. We walked through a twitchell from Huntingdon Road and found houses with addresses on Sherwin Walk, but we were looking for Sherwin Close. On the opposite side of the road were houses on Welbeck Walk, with Welbeck Close already mapped on OSM. This seems to be typical throughout the area: house addresses are slightly different from the streetname. In addition there are groups of houses which have a separate address, but no linked street: Rodel Court was one I noticed as we crossed Abbotsford Drive.

Once we turned onto St Ann's Well Road everything was much greener. The road itself is tree-lined, with lots of grass between the road and housing. We popped up one road (Instow Rise) to pick off a few street-names and came across another big green open space. Back on the main road I noticed a pair of Mistle Thrushes flitting about.

The real surprise, for those not in the know, was Robin Hood Chase: this is part of a series of green spaces preserved when the Nottingham common land was enclosed. This included the Clay Field an open field dating from mediaeval times, which covered the area which is now St Ann's. Although most of the land was very rapidly developed, a good proportion was retained. In recent years this wise decision has been marked by the Nottingham Enclosure Walk on the last Sunday in June, which takes a rambling route through the parks and gardens created as part of the Nottingham Enclosure Act. At the top end of the Chase there was an old cast iron notice stating that the council had not dedicated it as a highway. I presume this means that access rights are permissive, but more research is required. (It's worth noting, perhaps, that Robin Hood Chase does not appear on other online maps).

I forgot to take any photos so I've borrowed one from Geograph, and grabbed one from the 2009 Enclosure Walk. These give a reasonable idea of its role as a green lung.

Looking up Robin Hood Chase
© Alan Murray-Rust CC-BY-SA.

We managed to add or correct around 10 street names, but we noticed a lot of other things. Here's a non exhaustive list of the various other objects which got mapped from this session: traffic tables, speed limits (20 mph zone), access restrictions, traffic calming measures (cushions, humps, bumps, chicanes), pedestrian crossings, cycle parking, an ATM, shops, restaurants & fast-food outlets, an old cinema (see picture), churches, a few house numbers, post boxes, telephone kiosks, bus stops, a green roof, and a dead pub. This diversity is good for an introduction as most of these only require a node adding to OSM, so its possible to focus on tagging. Cycle Parking was the immediate attention grabber as there was no space at the back of the pub for a second bike: not only was the first cycle stand we came across mapped, it was used too.

There were also a few things which didn't get mapped for sundry reasons: solar-powered parking meters, hand car-wash in the former pub car-park, a SureStart children's centre, and the East Midlands Anglo Chinese Society. In the main this is because I don't know how to tag them: but hand car washes in derelict filling stations and pub car parks are becoming such a conspicuous feature of the contemporary urban landscape they probably deserve notice.

In the pub we talked quite a bit about OpenStreetBugs: David and Marcus both seemed keen on the idea of being able to mark-up things requiring mapping as an entry-level way of contributing. Kev showed how he was using OSB to mark cycle parking. David commented that he'd want to be able to filter by a category such as 'cycle infrastructure'. We briefly talked about KeepRight as well.

This led on to David's observation that he felt that quite a lot of existing cycleways were overly generously tagged. Kev agreed and remarked that he'd recently removed a lot of cycle tags on roads in the city centre: partly in response to change signage, but also because the original mapping was less than useful for cyclists. This is definitely a theme to follow: getting some in-depth feedback on what is mapped from potential users is not particularly common with OSM. I'd like to see what we can do in this direction with the Pedals membership.

This naturally led onto the Nottingham Hackspace. Last month Marcus suggested the Hackspace would be a good place for an OSM event. I went along the following open evening to see the Hackspace and meet its members and have been thinking about what we can do together ever since. But early in April the Hackspace's landlord lost its tenancy, and I've been following the saga of finding a new space. This was finally resolved only on Monday: the new space is huge and located just to the east of Sneinton Market. I only hope there isn't a plan to move every month requiring a re-map of the space and its surrounding area.

Thanks to everyone for an interesting evening. Once again I find I'm learning lots by talking with people less familiar with the intricacies of OSM.

Lastly, I've set next month's date for 24th May back at the Lincolnshire Poacher.