We have another London Mapping Party TONIGHT!

We had one a couple of weeks ago too, in Stratford. Who else remembers the Stratford Mapping Party in 2008? This was back in the days of epic street name gathering, but we did also do a bit of POI gathering, and I remember a big shopping mall near the station. But this same shopping mall is now looking a bit sad and pathetic under the shadow of the mondo-ginormous retail behemoth: Westfield Stratford City. This opened on the 13th, so we were there to map it the week after! (Thanks to Ollie for suggesting it)

This was fresh mapping without the aid of bing imagery (all new buildings). Sadly it wasn't really an opportunity to play with GPS gadgets since most of the details to be gathered were indoors.

I had a bit of an anxiety moment walking into the shopping mall, until I remembered my girlfriend wasn't with me. "It's OK we don't have to spend hours here. Just a quick bit mapping and then get the hell out!" I told myself. Although admittedly I did go inside one shop... LEGO!

Westfield has some funky touchscreen information systems with maps, and walking directions to get to things. This came in handy, because even after spending ages mapping, I still had no idea where the Cow pub was. Turned out there was a massive pedestrian shopping street type thing somewhere above which I had been unaware of. Of course multi-level shopping malls present all kinds nasty mapping challenges, but the worst thing is... they have beautifully detailed maps everywhere (which we probably shouldn't copy off)

The staff in the Cow pub were obviously new, and eating was very much a over-priced gastro restauranty experience. It was new and characterless, but probably not as bad as a whetherspoons. And it had cow pie, although Andy was not happy about the size. We talked about some stuff. (Got the notes Derick?)

more photos from me & Alex

Alex had a photo which he'd snapped out of an aeroplane window back in June, which included the shopping mall at an oblique angle:

This turned out to be pretty useful. Derick tried rectifying this and making that available as a PicLayer config. It's the first time I've used JOSM PicLayer plugin. For this kind of quick and dirty job, it works rather well, and I was able to draw in the outline of the shopping mall buildings, which others no doubt tweaked and played around with afterwards. Come to think if it, maybe we should have gone on the roof of the multi-storey carpark to try to get a GPS trace around some of the perimeter, but lining up the PicLayer photo with the bing imagery is roughly good enough.

I think Derick was trying to make an animation of the mapping progress. But I didn't input my data yet!

This evening we're off out mapping again. The cake diagram is on MapCraft. Grab yourself a slice, or set yourself some other mapping challenge... or just go to the pub. And in the pub look out for the guys from OpenSpending. They will be there too in the Betjamin Arms, St Pancras. Yes, it's the station pub. And guess what. It's also quite new and also has a shiny new shopping mall to be mapped nearby. I'll leave you with this quote from the great singer/song-writer Avril Lavigne:

"Dude you wanna crash the mall?"