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.

Mapping a specific building form

Arts-and-Craft style semi-detacheed houses, Edwards Lane Estate, Nottingham

My interest in many aspects of urban environments has increased greatly since I started contributing to OpenStreetMap.

I suppose this was always there but largely latent. Wandering around familiar places to capture details to add to OSM often forces me to ask questions about the area. Why is it there? Why is it laid out in that way? Who designed the buildings? When was it built? Why are there gaps in house numbering? What was planned for the little stub street? What used to be on the land with newer houses?