Good mapping session in the Oxford Street area for last night's mapping party. Given the state of exhaustion some London OSMers are in (still), I thought an easy central location would be the best bet.

The cake diagram covered some big central london shopping streets: Oxford Street itself (eastern end), Regents Street, Charing Chros Road, Tottenham Court Road. These all have bazillions of POIs (mainly shops) to add. It's very different from mapping streets in the suburbs. Insanely busy with people walking to and fro, presumably mostly on their Wednesday evening journey home. Standing still and looking at things feels like highly incongruous behaviour, but of course people are used to seeing weird characters in central London. You get a few people staring as they bustle past, but hopefully I didn't induce too much excessive paranoia

Writing down the name of every shop gets tedious quite quickly, but just as I was reaching the end of my slice of the cake, I found a missing street! What excitment! I'll have to try to find time to enter this data in now.

The blue posts pub was good apart from lack of food. I've been there a few times mainly on busy Fridays/Saturdays, but Wednesday evening the pub was very pleasantly quiet. It was almost eerie how well we could hear each other, and no problems getting a big table, which was lucky because we had quite a good turn-out

Having said that we need to work on attracting newbies, but we did at least have one: Emma, the CloudMade secretary/PA! She accompanied Matt mapping Tottenham Court Road, and seemed to quite enjoy it. Her bloke joined us all in the pub too. Always fun trying to convince these people that we're not a complete bunch of lunatics.

Naturally we talked a lot about the new API 0.6, which is a mixture of in depth server back-end topics (and judging by the photos there was some sort of delight or horror inspired by munin graphs ?? ) but also front end user feedback and discussion on how the history tab and changeset displays could be made more useful.

We chatted about the upcoming Milton Keynes Mapping party (may 16th/17th) and how this planned new town with it's spaced out roundabout-tastic design will be an interesting mapping challenge.

And we all enjoyed cheap sam smiths booze...

The next event will be Wednesday 6th May. I'll try and get around to picking a location soon. Details will be announced on the wiki page.