Category: Uncategorized

Recent changes I’ve made – Red/orange this weekend, green/yellow last week.

From my OpenStreetMap diary:

I’ve been making quite a few updates to East London recently, including:

• Mapping Queen Mary (University of London)‘s main Mile End Campus in detail, including all the buildings, the paths and other features. It was good to make use of a lot of first-hand knowledge I picked up (and the photos I took) when mapping the campus in the summer for an orienteering race.
• Adding building outlines and names for the main blocks in some of the housing estates around Hackney and Tower Hamlets.
• Adding in the detail for Mile End Park, which is alongside Queen Mary and was also part of the race. The Yahoo aerial imagery, and my own photographs, were very useful here.
• Mapping Hackney Wick, which is a curious enclave, quite a way from central Hackney and cut off from the rest of the borough by an ex-motorway, railway, river and canal. This included the maze of lanes and alleys that form the Trowbridge Estate (although I still don’t think I have it completely right) and the area to the south of the canal that is rapidly changing from industry to flats – although it has quite some way to go.
• Various updates along the route of London Cycle Route 8, which runs from Farringdon to Leyton. This included tagging/relating most of the route where it is waymarked, and updating the road layout along the route – adding various mini-roundabouts, cycle-only sections, and filling in De Beauvoir Square.
• Extending the 2012 Olympics site – the area that is sealed off by the distinctive blue walls now abutts Hackney Wick. I’ve also declassified all the roads in the park – they are now no-public-access service roads. Some of the roads have also been realigned or are completely dug up, and some of the railway lines have been bulldozed. I’ve added an outline for the main Olympic stadium, which is rapidly taking shape. Although I don’t have access to the park itself, there are a number of useful vantage points, including the Greenway, an elevated path that runs right through the site and is still open.
• As part of the above work on Hackney Wick and the Olympic site, I’ve deleted the A115. This road used to go from Hackney Wick to Stratford, however after a short stub into a housing/industrial estate at the Stratford end, the way is blocked by one of the 15 or so construction gates for the Olympic site. At the other end, the road similarly goes through quiet light industrial areas and then is blocked at a bridge. There are no signs visible for this road anywhere along its length or on roads approaching it, so it’s now downgraded.
• Adding the Mabley Green Boulder. Not quite sure how to classify this one – a large boulder that is an artwork but also a leisure/sporting facility. Osmarender is showing it a little too prominently at the moment.
• Adding in all the postboxes in the E9 postcode area (East Hackney), as part of the Dracos Locating Postboxes project.
• One non-London change – adding Rockall, based on some public-domain information and pictures. Funnily enough, I didn’t visit this one myself.

Instead of orienteering today, I organised a mapping party for UCL Geography. Three of us trekked out to Danbury, a historic village on a hill in Essex. Danbury lies just east of the extent of the high-resolution Yahoo aerial photography, so is almost completely unmapped. The village neatly splits into three main areas, so we each tackled one, by bike. After a couple of hours we retired to The Anchor pub for a late Sunday lunch – it was dark by the time we left, and very cold, so we skipped on mapping Little Baddow and headed back to upload the GPS data and add the topology to OpenStreetMap.

Here’s an automatically generated picture of our GPS traces for the day:

Here’s the Party Render animation, generated, like the picture above, from a very cool python script written by an OSMer:

My approach, from Chelmsford in the west and shown in green in the first picture above, was along National Cycle Route 1. As is often the case with the cycle network, it is not as direct as it could be.

The final result should appear on the main render on the OpenStreetMap website by Thursday.

I went along to an interesting talk today, by Martin Dodge on user generated cartography, focusing on OpenStreetMap. One of the websites he showed was the ITO website, which has a mode where you can view OSM data, highlighted according to various filters.

Here’s a graphic from ITO showing the Victoria Park area of East London, with my own contributions highlighted. Click to see the full-size image:

Here’s one showing all the ways tagged as being one-way streets. Looks like Hackney (to the north) is a lot more difficult to navigate in than Tower Hamlets (to the south):

This map shows the nearby National Cycle Network routes:

…and here’s where the parks are:

Here’s an age/gender breakdown of pre-entries from the City Race earlier this month:

It shows a good representation of “Open” class entrants – aged between 21 and 35, with the proportion of males-to-females reasonably balanced. There is the familiar participation dip, followed by the “baby boomer” surge – here, women are much more poorly represented.

This second graph looks at the ages of the non-affiliated entrants – those who didn’t list a club when entering. These people are most likely to be non-orienteering runners and other people new to the sport.

Again, participation is encouraging at the “Open” end, but there were almost no non-orienteering entrants to the race aged over 40.

Note that this data is on entrants rather than the people who took part on the race – anecdotally, many of the no-shows on the day were non-orienteering runners.