Last Sunday I spent the whole day roller-blading around the streets of Wembley. I managed to get a sun tan (in October!) and it was the most exercise I’ve done in a long time. It’s taken about a week for my legs to stop aching.

It was the Wembley Mapping Party, a gathering of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts who were surveying the streets gathering street names, pubs, bus stops, post boxes, and other such details to go on a map.

Here’s my GPS trace

Notice the interesting circular loopy bit. That’s Wembley Stadium!  I was also on personal mission to bag another stadium. I skated in a loop around the base of the building to get this GPS trace which I could then use to map it out reasonably accurately. OpenStreetMap did already have it, but the outline was drawn around yahoo aerial imagery which was out-of-date, showing the smaller previous stadium before it was rebuilt. The more circular footprint of the modern stadium should be showing up soon on openstreetmap (here)

This was a fun loop to draw by GPS, but most of the time the process of mapping out London is a bit more straightforward. We can rely on Yahoo! Aerial Imagery to give us a road layout, and so it’s mainly a matter of collecting street names (eliminating the orange unnamed streets) Anyone can get involved in that. It’s not too complicated. Create an account and try editing!