One of the most useful but also one of the most irritatingly
inconsistent features of the Vision of Britain web site is its
"places": without these, users would be dumped straight into the
complex collection of administrative units the underlying GIS is
really about, with fourteen units for Reading, Berkshire (the parish,
the poor law union, the rural and the urban sanitary district, etc);
but they only approximate a conventional list of the towns and
villages of Britain because the list of "places" is generated by
programs I wrote which try to group together administrative units
with similar locations and names.
One way forward is to carry on fine tuning those programs, so that
"Tadcaster" and "Hull" work, but I increasingly feel a better
solution would be to start with a quite separate list of "places"
with locations.
This does not need to include every hamlet in Britain, but does need
to be copyright free. As it also needs to include Ordnance Survey
grid references, this may be too tall an order -- but was there any
kind of atlas the OS published in the 1950s?
Of course, the coordinates do not have to be national grid, just
something that could be transformed into them. The US Geographical
Names Server data are maybe another way forward, but the data for the
UK contain only 17,273 "populated places", and I know these miss out
some significant villages. For example, Cradley Herefordshire is
there, but not Cradley Worcestershire, which makes it worse in one
respect than the current Vision of Britain system. The above count
is of names, not places, and there look to be a good few variant
names in there.
Any suggestions gratefully received, although even if I identify a
source computerising it will be an issue.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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