West Midlands Allotments

After a steep learning curve with Maperitive and OpenLayers there’s a map of allotments in the West Midlands available here. It’s still rough around the edges   but it forms the basis for further development (such as popups with more data). I only really cracked the techniques involved when I discovered Ed Loach’s wiki page. Thanks Ed! I hope people find it useful

The map is restricted to the West Midlands  because we wanted to work with a data set that was almost 100% complete. The data comes from web pages listing allotment sites published by the 7 local authorities in the West Midlands (Dudley,  Sandwell,  Walsall,  Wolverhampton,  Birmingham, Solihull,  Coventry).  We didn’t hit 100% as there were 14 allotment sites that either couldn’t be located or had other data quality issues. They are listed on a mappa-mercia wiki page and any help in resolving the issues listed would be welcome.  A word of praise here for Birmingham City Council who were able to answer a question about the location of a very small  3 plot redundant site which was at the back of some houses  within 2 minutes of contacting their call centre - very impressive.

It was interesting to see the diversity of how to present the information. The list of facilities available showed the most variation. Solihull was the most comprehensive : Site representative – Y/N; Car park – Y/N; Water – Y/N; Rubbish collection - Monthly from February to November; Green waste delivery - Yes at request of site representative; Security lock - Key (£10.00 deposit required). Solihull was also the only authority to have opened a new site and re-opened a semi-derelict one

Whilst editing the allotment sites, aerial imagery also showed up other sites which are privately-run and not run by a local Authority, so our map and underlying dataset shows a more accurate picture that what can be gained just from local authority listings. Even now we might not have located all the privately-owned and run sites - any help or information will be greatly appreciated.

Sadly we were not able to gather via this route the information we set out to obtain for the Allotment Data project which was waiting list data. Local Authorities do not generally hold this data:  this is maintained by each allotment site association. This will require either a concerted phone campaign or volunteered information  as and when (and if) people see value in this map.

As a result of this work, we discovered the work being done by the New Optimists Forum on food security, and inspired similar work to complete allotment data for Warwickshire. Keep going Andrew!

Mapping data on a themed basis like this opens up all kinds of interesting and linked information and also helps to make contacts and connections with owners and users of the data. Highly recommended for online community building!

Birmingham prepares for winter

This statue can be found in the heart of the Bullring retail complex right in front of the Rotunda. I was tempted to tag it with  woolly_jumper=yes!

For those of you reading this from outside the UK who think the English are kind to animals I bet you didn't think we were kind even to statues of animals

Birmingham's Custard Factory

 If this statement is true, and I believe it is, then an OSM map of  a city  is meta-art!

This sign adorns the Custard Factory in Digbeth, close to the City Centre; now a thriving arts and media hub with many small businesses located there. As the name suggests it was originally home to Birds Custard manufacture.

Heart of England Way completely mapped!

On Sunday I completed a short 4Km stretch around Blockley, the last remaining gap in the OSM map.  Thanks are due to everyone who contributed over the years, collaborating in mapping this long distance route.

The Heart of England Way stretches for some 100 miles through England's midlands. This route proves that the midlands does not justify its image of an industrial wasteland. The Way starts in Staffordshire's heathlands and forest on Cannock Chase and passes through the small city of Lichfield with its three-spired cathedral known as the "Mother of the Midlands". It then passe between the industrial giants of Coventry and Birmingham, although with  the peaceful countryside it chooses, you wouldn't know they were there.  Rural Warwickshire beckons as the Way meanders through the remains of the Forest of Arden. The final part sees it sharing much of its route with the Monarch's Way as it leapfrogs from one cosy Cotswold village to another. It finally ends up in the tourist honeypot of Bourton-on-the Water, where it links with the Cotswold Way.

The most popular Guide to the Way by Richard Sale  has the route going the other way, but describing it this way  reflects more the order in which we mapped it.

Official website here
Best map is of course Lonvia's Hiking map

Architectural Heritage in Edgbaston

It seems that just about every other house in Edgbaston is listed!
( for non-UK readers a listed building is deemed to be of architectural or historic merit and there are strict planning rules as to what you are allowed and not allowed to do in altering and maintaining it).

As you can see from the map below it's a historic part of Birmingham, mostly where the old industrialists lived and thanks to the Calthorpe Estate and the proclivities of said nineteenth century industrialists there weren't many factories or pubs or cheap back-to-back housing built there ( all the yellow buildings are listed)

A few  examples of listed buildings in the area

As you can see it's not a cheap area of Birmingham to live in, even today

August Midland Mappers Meet

After some mapping activity in the area of Smethwick which is to the North West  of Birmingham we ended up in the excellent little pub The Black Eagle on the aptly named Factory Road. The pub is like a country pub complete with garden and serves great food and real ale, including the famed Black Country brew Batham's Bitter. It was so good we're meeting there next month ( nearest metro stop is Soho Benson Road)

We discussed the impact of losing data from people who have not accepted the new CTs; how to recruit new mappers; how to deal with rogue mappers; the possibility arranging some skills transfers sessions and creating a wiki log of all the upcoming re-developments in the region to remind ourselves of future mapping surveys.

The major landmark in the pre-meeting survey of the area was the Soho Foundry created by Matthew Boutlon and James Watt in 1795 which still fronts a large industrial site now operated by Avery Weightronix.
The low mark of the evening was the sadly dilapidated Black Patch Park groaning under the weight of fly tippers rubbish.

A Good Read

This book, written by a couple of poets takes you to all those places that only mappers have visited repeatedly to lovingly survey and map every detail. Edgelands  addresses all those betwixt-and-between places that aren't really urban and aren't really rural and are certainly not loved or cared-for. They're the kind of places we hurry through to get somewhere else or the kind of places that we just don't acknowledge exist at all. You know the kind of places: brownfield sites, abandoned parking lots, sewage plants, power plants, abandoned construction sites, out-of-town shopping malls and industrial estates after hours. The poets talk about them reverentially and find a stark and melancholy beauty there.

The bookjacket blurb puts it excellently: " Edgelands explores a wilderness that is much closer than you think: a debatable zone, neither the city nor the countryside, but a place in-between - so familiar it is never seen for looking. Passed through, negotiated, un-named, ignored, the edgelands have become the great wild places on our doorsteps, places so difficult to acknowledge they barely exist".

But us mappers have been there and struggled with all their idosyncracies and even dynamism as they change use,  in our quest to leave no white space on the map.  Enjoy a different perspective of these places.

ISBN 978-0224-08902-9 published by Jonathan Cape