Hello, As anyone mapping in the UK knows, in most areas housenumber coverage is abysmal. For example, germany has 14 million housenumbers, USA has 10 million and the UK has about 1.6 million as of 2018.[1]
Therefore, an open data source of housenumbers would make it significantly easier to add housenumbers. The only other method is surveys, which is slow and tedious and can only really be done over a small area. The UK government refuse to make this commercial[1][2] data available openly. It has come to my attention that the "Town Plan" map from 1944-1967 in NLS is available freely. Here is the tms if you want to test it in JOSM: tms:https://geo.nls.uk/mapdata3/os/ldn_tile/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png This is just the tms for london and south east england, I do not know the TMS for the Scotland map. This imagery extends to Brighton and Southend, although it does not provide housenumbers in those areas, only buildings. (However, for some reason housenumbers are present in the districts west of Brighton, e.g Worthing). Due to it being an old map, lots of construction and destruction has taken place since then, so in some areas of London, this map will not be useful. However, many buildings have remained the same since then, and if that case this map provides a far, far quicker way of mapping housenumbers compared to going out and surveying them yourself. If you want to see an example of this imagery being used, "Stratford New Town" in London used this imagery to map housenumbers.[1] Housenumbers in Edinburgh were also mapped using this NLS imagery.[2][3] This should be very useful to many London mappers, and it would be great if people would start entering this data right away. However, I think the best way of getting all this data into OSM is by using a tasking manager. As of current, I don't think there is a UK tasking manager, I think it is worth it create one just for this task. The other advantage of a tasking manager is that you can mark "bad imagery", in other words, you can mark tiles where construction has taken place, making the map useless. This will make it more efficient to co-operate. If OSM UK can be contacted about implementing a tasking manager for this, that would be great. If this can be pulled off properly (tasking manager, outreach etc.), that would mean housenumbers in most of London!! This would genuinely be incredible. Thanks, IpswichMapper [1]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/points-of-interest [2]: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/products/addressbase-premium [3]: https://qa.poole.ch/addresses/ [4]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1341723829#map=13/51.5507/0.0030 [5]: https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/research/research-projects/mapping-edinburgh-s-social-history [6]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/55.9821/-3.2444
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