I mentioned in my previous post about why it’s great to meet up with other mappers. One thing that someone suggested I write a diary about is the method I found to be notified about map-worthy changes to one’s local area. It turns out that not everyone has heard of the London Gazette, its role in local law and administrative changes in the UK, and the online services it offers to help discover the changes.

So here’s the Wikipedia page for the Gazette And here’s the website

The core of the publication is the notices. The rules of the road network for residential and even some of the more major roads in an area (pretty much everything that doesn’t constitute the trunk road network) are delegated to local authorities, and the ritual incantation they have to go through to change those rules is to publish notices in the local press and in the London (or Edinburgh or Belfast) Gazette.

In the navigation bar at the top of the page is a Notices menu, which will list all the most recent notices in the UK.

There are filters on the left hand side of this page where you can search for and filter the list to the particular notice type and area you’re interested in. For my local area, for things I might want to add to OSM, I’ve found that the following customisations work best:

• restricting the list to Notice Code 1501

• filtering the location by Local Authority from the drop-down box (in my case, the London Borough of Ealing)

• Hitting the “Update results” button and then changing the sort order to “Latest”.

What you’ll get back is a list of all the most recent changes the highway authority in your area have made. This will often include changes to parking arrangements (disabled bays, stop and shop, CPZs, double yellow lines, etc) but also changes to make roads one way, to stop up some routes, installing Bike Hangars, and electric vehicle charging points. Even introductions of traffic calming (cushions and tables) and zebra and pelican crossings, and new protected bike lanes.

Cleverer still is the RSS feed functionality if you scroll down to the bottom of the left hand menu. That creates a customised URL for the filters and sort you’ve applied, and you can add this to your favourite feed reader which will check the feed on your behalf regularly, and notify you when your local authority has proposed changes.

You don’t have a favourite feed reader? I have one installed specifically for Gazette notices, and use feeder.co, which has a plugin for Chrome and other browsers. Once you follow the feed, the reader will check it periodically for changes and notify you.

The notices that the local authority publish often have diagrams that don’t make it into the Gazette, but often they have a separate website where you can look up further details, or an email address you can contact for further info. Or you can use the information to plan a surveying visit or add a map note in the vicinity.