I don’t think I used to map post-boxes. Partly because I’m not that interested in them, partly because I sort of assumed they should have been imported en masse at some point from a Royal Mail open data dump of some sort (naive?).

But when I read SK53’s interesting post about the completeness of post-box mapping in Britain, I was really surprised to learn that OSM had less than 50% of the postboxes in Britain. So I’ve started mapping post boxes when I come across them.

As it turns out, I could have started with the one at the end of my road. It was already there in the map, but it had the wrong reference number, though I only noticed that recently. Even in central London and central Birmingham (two hyper-mapped cities) I’ve found some postboxes that have sat there unmapped for years.

Anyway, a quick search finds that I’ve added or fixed 79 post-boxes in the map so far. Mappers, next time you see a post-box, please map it - post boxes are useful things to have on a map…