The last London mapping evening, was on Thursday last week, which was uncomfortably close after the big conference weekend. I've been ultra busy all week following up on things and catching up on things (CloudMade have had a flood of enquiries about this that and the other). Happily User:Solexious was keen to prepare a nice cake diagram, which was one less thing for me to worry about. Thanks for that.

By the way, if anyone ever wants to get involved organising a London meet-up, or just one aspect of London meet-up, please feel free join in and/or take over. Choosing pubs, preparing cake diagrams, setting up event listings, etc, all takes time. I mostly enjoy doing it, but I also quite like not having to do it :-)

In fact I didn't have to choose the area & pub this time either. The Kings Road mapping party was Matt's idea. It's a frightfully posh area. I think we all enjoyed not having any grotty concrete housing estate to map for a change. No no, it's all quaint little residential streets with white columns, or multicoloured pastel washes, in an area which apparently has the largest per square-metre property prices after central Hong Kong!

I met with Joe Eckert who was interested to see my mapping techniques, and interviewing me about OpenStreetmap for his research. It was a good mixed mapping session for this purpose. We wandered around some of these pleasant residential backstreets, and also mapped a length of Kings Road itself. Lots of shops, which I photo-mapped (which means leaving most of the effort still to do back on the computer) Very hoity-toity fashion shops. Nothing like my mapping Roman Road at the previous Bow mapping evening (The fast food icons are mostly kebab shops. Classy)

So nice bit of mapping, and then we went to the pub fairly early, to have a proper interview. Henry J Beans was pretty crowded and noisey, but it was Matt's recommendation, so we shouldn't be surprised. He is an all-night clubbing party animal kind of guy. We managed to find a secluded corner with a big table in the garden at the back, but sadly that part of the beer garden closed at 8pm. The remaining garden area was quite crowded. We beat a tactical retreat into the noisey indoors, which was a smart move because we got a big table, and shorty afterwards it started chucking down!

It was good to have Cragg along. He was testing walking-papers.org. Shaun made it too. He always makes it, so that's no surprise until you consider that he'd been to Edinburgh and back that day on some crazy OpenStreetMap errand! Gregory was along. He's around in London for a while before heading out to live in Vancouver for a bit. Very nice. All in all we had about 12 people.

Hopefully we'll see a nice use of our mapping efforts later in the year when kingsroad.co.uk launches. They're planning to use OpenStreetMap.