OpenStreetMap
Flats and Rows of Townhouses
Posted by Ghostwalking on 25 October 2023 in English. Last updated on 26 October 2023.Over the last few months, I’ve been filling out the houses and buildings in southwest London because I’m bored and have taken a strange fixation on improving the map in this way.
I have noted a few things over the last few months, particularly how the addresses to flats and rows of townhouses are managed. when marking out an area for a building of flats it only lets me put one address in, when flats typically have multiple addresses attached to the same physical building.
Not a major drawback at the moment but this is the main reason im not filling addresses in as there are typicaly more than one address attached to each building. Im not a coder here but this is my mild wednesday musing put on paper.
Discussion
Comment from Friendly_Ghost on 26 October 2023 at 05:42
Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you!
A practical solution to the addresses issue is to map the addresses as nodes inside the building area, not on the building itself. Then you can map each address individually.
Happy mapping :)
Comment from spiregrain on 26 October 2023 at 10:10
There are lots of ways to do it.
For rows of townhouses (terraces) you can add a few addresses as nodes (like Friendly_Ghost says), and then connect them with a way tagged addr:interpolation=odd (or ‘even’, or ‘all’). That looks like this on the map:-https://osm.org/go/0EEQbBTwl– (note the dotted lines between building addresses).
For flats within a building, you could add addr:flats=4-10 (for the addresses) and building:flats=7 (to indicate just how many flats are in there). If the building has multiple doors, some giving access to different ranges of flats, you could add a node for the door, mark it with an entrance tag and an addr:flats=1-4 for the first door, addr:flats=5-10 for the second door, etc. (like on Cleveland House here - https://osm.org/go/0EERIWUWD )
If the buildings are pre-c.1960, you could also look at using certain NLS maps for a pretty good, usable, copyable, addressing data. You can add them as a custom map layer in iD editor, and align them to the UK Cadastral. See here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/National_Library_of_Scotland#Using_the_NLS_historical_mapping_for_OSM_editing
Maybe the “NLS - OS 1:1,250/1:2,500 National Grid maps, 1947-1963 - Max zoom 19. (London and south-east England only - grid square TQ)” map will have your local area on it?
Comment from Wynndale on 26 October 2023 at 20:42
Another thing you could try if there are separate entrances is to put addresses on each entrance, for instance https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/51.45291/-0.19706.
Comment from Ghostwalking on 27 October 2023 at 18:08
@wynndale
this was my original thinking on how to manage the situation although the other half of me noticed it would take about 20 years to fully map all of South West London this way…..
part of me is just focused on getting the raw building data fed into the map at the moment. i may feed full address data in the future depending on time.