Roads in London without a city name

Map Editors Community United Kingdom
1

Is there a convention for what city name to apply ? Many roads near me, major and minor, have no city name at all, a few have ‘Hoxton’ but ‘Shoreditch’ or ‘Hackney’ or ‘London’ would also seem to be applicable.

The obvious choice would seem to be London, but I gather there might be issues with cities stretching if the naming is applied inconsistently.

I couldn’t find guidelines in the wiki, can anyone help ?

2

I’ll butt in quickly with a definitely not “London”! We spent weeks deleting them from all over the place last year and still find a good few each week. The problem with London is either everything needs to be London or nothing. Piecemeal Londons just create a widespread sprawl which starts to self-propagate as others merely copy. Mostly SW London and SE London has been well named but particularly your part of London needs a lot of work.

Others will shortly be posting more soon …

3

I hope they do :slight_smile: I just found this but it has no definitive answers.

4

Probably better to stick with the Wiki for some things:

How to label cities (United Kingdom)

5

If I follow that I still have a wide choice for my area. E.g.

Hoxton (London)
Islington (London)
Hackney (London)
N1 (London)
Old Street (London)
Shoreditch (London)

All depends on what you accept as the most common name for my locality. And none of them match the convention in use in south london, which would omit the ’ (London)’ from my examples above.

6

Not N1. And we’ve moved away from “county” in parentheses unless it duplicates another locality elsewhere.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk

7

Hmm, okay, but the wiki has some specific guidelines about city suburbs, which I thought were applicable here, and which contradict that.

Is the wiki in need of an update ? Or am I mis-applying the guidelines on suburbs ?

8

London is “special”. The Wiki needs an update.

9

There aren’t any London-specific guidelines in the Wiki. Most of the recent discussion can be found in this topic, where I was the one who actually proposed deleting it completely!

Trying to summarise as best I can :wink:

  • “London” as a navigation destination is useless. If you navigate to “London”, the chances of any single point being where you want to go are miniscule.
  • “London” is useless in traffic reports. A report of delays on “Southend Lane in London” are useless unless (a) there’s only one Southend Lane in London and (b) you know where it is
  • If there was a London city polygon, it would cover a massive area wiping out everything else.
  • When we get counties (“soon” as defined by Waze - a bit like “Microsoft minutes”), London will be a county.
  • It’s best to stick to more localised names. If they’re unique in the country (e.g. Lewisham), just use them plain. If they’re not unique and the non-London locality is larger, use (London) - e.g. West Green (London). When counties arrive the suffixes can go.
  • Be very careful with boundaries. Most publicly available sources are based on things like electoral wards. These have been moved so much over the years that the boundaries rarely agree with what local residents or drivers would say. This includes localities that come in the OS OpenData script. The only relatively safe boundaries are postcode boundaries - they’ve been there a long time and the Post Office rarely has reason to change them. Other than that look for things like major routes, waterways, railway lines, green space. These often form the "real boundaries between localities.
  • If a major road is the boundary, leave it with no city name. If you choose one you will be wrong! :lol:
  • Pay careful attention to any city names already set. If another editor has set some names, they may know better than you do. Check with them by PM or on the forums before over-writing someone else’s work.
  • If you’re not sure of the boundaries, just do the central area where you are sure. A bit of “blank” space around the edges won’t hurt.
  • Don’t get too detailed. The tiny named area you live in may mean everything to you, but will someone who lives 5 miles away ever have heard the name? If you’ve never heard the name mentioned on a traffic report, it might be too small to bother with.

That’s a bit more detail than I planned! But I have been planning to try and come up with a better “city-naming” section on the UK Wiki, so these are some of the major points that will probably be included.

10

That’s a great help, thanks. I’ve just done a quick placeholder edit on the wiki page pointing to your post. I’m sure my wiki edit could be improved, but it’s something at least.

11

That’s not a bad thing to do - and I have thanked you for it above. However we do prefer that people do not just go in and edit the Wiki without discussion first (see here).

In this case, given that the Wiki is overdue for an update, I don’t think you’re going to get any disagreement. :wink:

12

Thanks, I obviously didn’t notice that bit of protocol.

13

Apart from the guidance for naming areas that are in Greater London politically, but in the old counties for postal address purposes - eg Bromley, Enfield, Hornchurch and Belmont(Surrey) vs Belmont(Middx) (which still shows on the map wrongly, in my view, as Belmont(London), but I’ve never had the time or inclination to push my way into someone else’s area and change it).

I look forward to reading your proposals for where to define the boundary of London when we have counties!

14

The boundary is that of Greater London, as defined by Ordnance Survey.

15

The postal counties ceased being used by the Royal Mail in 1996.

16

Hi,

Most main roads that are boarders are split “down the middle”. One side being in area a and the other side area b.

I posted recently that perhaps, just perhaps, a convention is adopted to name areas/suburbs where bordering areas name the “main road” to right and bottom. Or left and top.
You could, theoretically apply the same to “london” boroughs using right/bottom north of the river and then top/left south of the river.

No one commented though… :frowning:

Des. . . :wink:

17

Agreed, the Royal Mail stopped using them - reliance on postcodes meant that even the Post-town is not strictly necessary (You can generally get away with a street number and a post-code to produce a unique postal address. I won’t say that’s still the case - it was when I was working actively with PAF but I left that job in 1996 (co-incidentally)).

But that doesn’t mean that people who live in those areas don’t still use the counties and remain bitterly upset that they find themselves in Greater London (there is an active campaign to move Coulsdon back into Surrey from Croydon, but that’s for a variety of reasons other than their address!). I do have to accept that the almost universal use of postcode-based algorithms to generate mailing addresses means that the old postal counties no longer appear on most business correspondence.

But we will still need to differentiate between localities with the same name in London and, sticking to the example I used in the wiki, the options seem to be Belmont (Surrey) or Belmont (Sutton) and Belmont (Middx) or Belmont (Harrow). That’s what I meant by asking where the boundary of London will be.

Sorry, but I’m a bit of a cracked record on this. I know it’s just another aspect of my OCD, but I think that’s a trait I share with a lot of other Waze editors! :wink:

18

I think we want to move away from mythical places like Middlesex.