Central London

Central London, London

Latitude : 51.52, Longitude : -0.127

Browse Central London map

Edit map

Users in Central London GPS traces Wallpaper image: jpeg, png Maplint informationfreeway Check Map Features via Query-to-map Check streets with no-names Geohack for OSM with more maps

External links: OSM Inspector OpenStreetBrowser OpenStreetBugs MapDust Keep Right! Coastline checker Public transport Wikipedia: en Google (& Image search) Webshots Geograph ODBL coverage

Use this template for your city • What do the links do?

Central London is a area in London at latitude 51.52, longitude -0.127.

Central London is a pretty awesome example of many people collaborating on one area. There's areas of amazing detail. We beat google hands down, particularly with regard to extra details like pubs and showing parks and green areas. The NaPTAN import will give us bus stops (something which google started showing recently)

However central London is also an example of the difficulties of tracking completeness when so many people are involved. There are areas where we are assuming the map data is accurate and complete, but in fact it was just thrown in quickly, perhaps during the old London mapping party, and nobody has been back since to double-check accuracy (or even straightened roads from Yahoo). We need to somehow coordinate a systematic second pass of central London.

Other aspects of central London to work on:

• POIs - Pubs, post boxes, banks, cash machines, supermarkets, and shops. etc Which POIs to record, is something which has always been left to the whims of the mapper, but safe to say there are a lot which can be added in central London.

• Buildings - The somewhat ludicrous process of tracing over building outlines is becoming popular for bored London mappers. As of March 2009 there's big patches in angel and putney. In residential areas it can feel like this is necessary in order to make sense of awkward shapes of housing estates. For very central commercial areas of London, it's less revealing. Whole blocks between roads are just solid building. It's tedious, but maybe for a balanced map we'll have to crack on with it. compare Helsinki . Harry's been blogging about this: [1] [2] [3] [4]
• House numbering - For addressing. Following the Karlsruhe Schema
• Buses - Now that the NaPTAN data is imported, we have lots of work to do merging bus stops. We can also crack on with routing relations (see Buses) Progress so far is rendered here.
• Landuse - We've all ignored this for a long time. Currently there's still a patch between Baker St and Oxford Street where somebody filled it in. This looks highly incongruous. Drawing polygons in crowded areas can be fiddly, and in general there's plenty of unanswered questions about landuse polygons, but maybe we should just get on with it.

See also London! All of the above points are less important than basic street mapping outside of the centre (pushing back the NoName boundary)