or,

Watch Out for the Middle-Class

I’ve been mapping regularly since 21 March 2016, but this is my first Diary entry since then. I’ll attempt to blog as often as I can from now on. Meanwhile, my most recent trace was uploaded a few minutes back. The longest vertical trace is Thorneywood Mount, starting & finishing at the bottom, at the junction of Donkey Hill†, Thorneywood Mount & Thorneywood Rise, and covering it’s entire length up to it’s junction with Porchester Road. The trace was made this afternoon as I gathered house number info, etc. from Thorneywood Mount & all streets between it & Porchester Road.

Most of the OSM street info for my neck of the woods (NG3:- St. Anns, Nottingham, England) seems complete, but not the houses nor the house number/names. Across the last month or so I’ve filled in most of that information for a section of St Anns bounded by Donkey Hill, Thorneywood Rise, Carlton Road, Saint Matthias Road, Southampton Street & Saint Ann’s Well Road. After the April 2016 Pub Meetup I reviewed the whole thing & decided to continue – it seems that I like having to deal with the middle-class chewing at my neck – and began to extend the mapping to the north-east of Donkey Hill‡.

A good deal of the houses covered by myself so far have been terraces; classic working class housing stock, although since Maggie Thatcher increasingly colonised by the middle-class. Some of it has been much more hoity-toity than that (what in my days at Newcastle University the locals called “all fur coats & nae knickers”); a typical example was the upper part of Bluebell Hill Road. However, today’s patch was entirely of the latter variety. I could tell that by the number of folks that called me out with “What do you think you are doing?”. A classic example occurred on Thorneywood Mount near the top at Porchester Road. These are institutions operated by an NHS Trust that I provided Network Support for 10 years ago. Prior to Maggie Thatcher nurses were almost entirely working class. Today they are all middle-class (witness their degrees) and it shows.

There is a GPS tracker available called OSMTracker; I use the Android version. Mostly, I take voice notes (20 secs seems best for me) + take photos whilst tracking. The latter are particularly useful for building-/house-names as belt’n’braces for if the voice-note fails. I did that for 145, 106 & 114 Thorneywood Mount. Prominent on the pictures is a notice saying that there is “24-Hour CCTV”. 5 minutes later I realised that I’d forgotten to record the traffic chokes & back-tracked towards them; whilst doing so I passed 5 nurses talking on the street outside those institutions. They were talking about me! They collared me, and I spent 20 minutes explaining my actions & displaying the photos to reassure them that I had their best interests at heart.

Here are examples of things to have upfront in your mind to avoid problems + demonstrate your probity whilst taking photos as you track for OSM:-

• Public notices are public property; keep private matters out of your photos
• Limit the scope of your photo
  (eg if you photograph a housename, keep the front window out of it)
• Pictures of people are a no-no
• The same goes for car licence plates
• Where you are standing when taking the photo is one of the biggest issues
  (no issue if that is public property - thanks LivingWithDragons)
• Next is why you are taking the photos (thanks LivingWithDragons)
• Next what you are photographing
  (my endless photos of 20 mph signs tends to disarm criticism – thanks LivingWithDragons)

One thing that keeps becoming clear is that I need Cards to id myself & give to others, plus, perhaps some literature to give to save myself 5 or 10 minutes explaining each time what the hell OSM is.

†PS
The ‘official’ name for Donkey Hill is “Saint Bartholomews Road”, but no-one locally calls it that, and particularly as the church that it was named after was pulled down in the 1970s. The local legend is that the name comes from an entrepreneur who lived in Victorian times & stood with a donkey at the foot of the road at it’s juncture with Saint Ann’s Well Road. That fact makes more sense when you know that:-

1. Donkey Hill is the steepest road in Nottingham.
2. Saint Ann’s Well Road used to be the busiest shopping road in Nottingham (killed as such by the council via clearances in the 1970s as to protect the new city-centre Victoria Centre shopping arcade).
3. Roads near the top of Donkey Hill housed a large number of wealthy widows.

‡PPS
In my recent comment-to-changesets I put “Additions east of Donkey Hill…”. The area I was working in each time was actually north-east of Donkey Hill.

Coda:

28 April 2016: I just came across a July 2011 diary entry from Eriks Zelenka (based in Wokingham, in SE England). He got collared whilst tracking by a middle-class ‘paranoid guy’ who called the police. 6 police turned up in 3 cars & Eriks ended up arrested because he could not prove that his bike was his property; they took his fingerprints & DNA + searched his flat.

One of the comments contained a very useful link to a Citizen’s Advice page setting out the scope of police powers of arrest, etc. in England (there are differing variations on this in Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales).