Hi John, I know exactly what you mean here (both my godson & my niece own such houses), but I think building=town_house is likely to be deeply ambiguous for someone not familiar with this usage. For instance the Wikipedia article.on British use of townhouse is illustrated with a building which looks like a small palace : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townhouse_(Great_Britain). I think you need to accept house=terraced and use an additional tag.
I've checked other locations and a surprisingly wide range of tags are used (my godsons house is building=residential), but most, including my own mapping use house=terraced. The relatively small number of uses for town_house are very widely distributed across the world predominantly in Europe and North America, but a few elsewhere, such as West Africa. Usage increased significantly fairly recently : https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/house=town_house. I'd suggest that the tag is probably used with different meanings. Terraced houses provide a certain difficulty in the UK because of their ubiquity across all income brackets & classes (Belgravia, or Regency Bath to the back streets, of say, Hartlepool). It would be useful to find a way of distinguishing between them. Your town houses represent one easily recognised subtype. There are one or two other housing types which are sufficiently distinctive, but which I've noticed get changed to a more generic tag: link detached houses (garage walls are shared between two houses), and maisonettes (particularly blocks of four). Chalet (or dormer) bungalows, and mews houses are others. I'd very tentatively suggest something like house=terraced, terraced=town_house (or even modern_town_house). An alternative might be integral_garage=yes. On a more general level there are other whole categories of residential properties which it would be interesting to be able to identify by tagging. I'm particularly interested in defective or non-standard housing such as the BISF house (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BISF_house), see this recent Mastodon thread https://en.osm.town/@SK53/114330002843070525. Some of this can be achieved by use of existing tags (for instance a chalet bungalow would have roof:levels=1), BUT that requires consistency in tagging (all bungalows would require a roof:level tag). I therefore think we could do with one or more additional tags to allow finer discrimination of housing types. Regards, Jerry PS. Stefan Muthesius wrote a fine scholarly work on the English Terraced House https://archive.org/details/englishterracedh0000stef On Sat, 19 Apr 2025, 09:01 John Rowbotham via Talk-GB, < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello all, I appear to be in dispute with a relatively new mapper about > one of the most popular forms of housing in my area. > > > > I've had several of my tags changed from terraced house to town house. > The mapper says town houses aren't valid. > > > > These are hundreds of domestic brick built properties constructed in the > last 7 years, all fitted with solar panels, some with vehicle access > through void parts of the ground floor area to gated parking at their > rears, some with 'attic dressing rooms' on their third floors. Talking to > the original designers and planners of the estate, the idea (reflected in > marketing and promotion which spoke of 'modern town houses'), the intention > was to modernise the feel of traditional back-to-back Victorian terraces > common in the borough and mostly built in response to the 1880 Act. > Indeed, something that really interested the Royal team who visited during > the build was the difference between the old style and these 21st century > versions. > > > > So - is using 'town house' banned, as my correspondent says, or a useful > way to differentiate between 120 years' of connected domestic housing > design? I'm happy to be overruled if we can't use the tags this way. But > I did do the legwork on site to call the properties what they are known as > based on conversations with their builders. > > > > Changeset #165128178 <https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/165128178> > is typical. I did offer to meet the mapper at the nearby (excellent) pub > for a chat and share ideas but it seems now that he does most of his > mapping near Niagara Falls. > > > > Thanks for any tips or ideas, John. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb >
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