On 30/01/2019 16:00, Tom Hughes wrote:
The fundamental problem with this, as Jerry has just said, is that many towns in the UK have no defined boundary. Even where there is an administrative entity there is no guarantee that it's boundary equates to what most people would view as the boundary of the town - it may under or overstate things.
One useful thing here is the ONS concept of a "Built Up Area". That aims to give the normal human name of a defined place - for example, Mansfield and Maidenhead are both in the list, and mean what someone living there would expect them to mean. And it has subdivisions for major settlements - for example, the BUA of Greater London includes BUASDs of Bromley and Camden.
Shapefiles are available from the ONS Geography website, and are OGL, so they're compatible with OSM.
The downside of ONS BUA data is that it's only updated once per census, so the current dataset is now a bit out of date - it doesn't take account of new developments on the edge of existing settlements, for example. But, as a simple source of names, it's very valuable. And alterations to boundaries can be mapped on the ground, provided you've got an existing boundary to work with.
Equally there is no clear way of even determining what is, or is not, a town. Just a variety of rules-of-thumb...
As far as local government is concerned, there is a defined meaning of a town. That is, any settlement which has a town council (eg, Evesham, Newmarket). And, for larger settlements, the word "town" is what most people would call what is, officially, a non-metropolitan borough (eg, Bromsgrove, Ipswich).
More generally, while there's no single definition of a town, it can be reasonably assumed to be the default terminology for any built-up area unless you know for certain that it isn't a town (eg, because it's a city, or it has a parish council, or is too small to have a council at all).
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