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Mapper since:
July 15, 2021
Last map edit:
August 20, 2026

Communications leader in a major organisation, photographer, writer. Former government surveyor and officer in council borough engineers department.

Currently mapping the A580 East Lancashire Road corridor house by house, mainly in the Wigan Borough area so far. I try to give addresses, building types, any relevant history and start date if known. I’ll also include useful local knowledge including verifiable information from people in and around the properties which I’m adding to the map.

All my mapping is small scale and manual. I use iD editor after onsite visits and surveys and I cross reference to UK cadastral data for location accuracy.

Thank you for suggestions and revisions received. I’m always keen to learn more.

Give me a shout

If you are local to the Wigan/Leigh A580 area or if you’re working in areas where I’ve been out and about, I’d be delighted to say hello. Or if you are not local to Wigan Borough and reliant on aerial imagery, please message me with any questions. Much has changed locally since the last satellite views we have.

I do sometimes reach out via messages to cross-reference things. Not everyone wants to reply but if you can respond, please do. Hi again to some mappers working near me who’ve been in touch in really positive and helpful ways, it’s appreciated. And for those who prefer to work solo or don’t want to reply, forgive me for reaching out. It’s to save duplication or my time if you have already been where I’ve got notes and data.

Nice to be part of UK chats on Big Blue Button and at recent London Geomobs.

If you can teach me anything fancy like JOSM or Potlatch or other hi-tech software apps and want a free beer or three, please contact me.

Recent successes

  • I found and added an absent residential road in Astley which is hundreds of years old and one in the Plank Lane area unmapped for a century.
  • I’ve started to understand the old land use influencing why there are gaps in modern housing developments and record previous land use in notes/descriptions.
  • I’ve manually corrected many ‘spiky buildings’/AI slop labelled vaguely and given them the correct specific housing tags and details. Gosh, there’s a lot of forum debate about the ‘value’ of filling the map with shapes that just make OSM look really odd to folk!
  • I surveyed a whole rural Lancashire area this spring in response to an appeal from a local mapper whose postcode data was wrong and baffling parcel delivery people.

I lost the battle trying to differentiate between 1880s back-to-back housing rows and 2020s style mews properties though, which are all to be called ‘terraced’. A shame.

Advice please

I’ve asked on various chat forums but please message me with a way to record name detail on terraced houses. I map each property as an individual, numbered hereditament of course. But how to map the name of the whole terrace as it appears on a plaque usually in the middle of the row? It’s not the road name or an individual house name but this is valuable identification (and build date) information publicly displayed and people do use this to identify a locality. It needs to be visible in most browser views of OSM not deep in the metadata.