Hi all,
I’ve just read a BBC News article on New swimming sites for England which led me to the Environment Agency’s data on bathing waters in England.
The data appears to be licenced as OGL 3.0. I was wondering if this data had been included in OSM yet? Or if it could be used as a checklist to see if we’ve mapped the sites? Presumably such places could be tagged as leisure=bathing_place?
I had a similar thought when I saw the data set for Scotland a while ago. I also think that leisure=bathing_place could be a good fit for many of the “bathing waters” in the UK. The data should also contain the EU bathing water ID which can be recorded in the OSM tag ref:EU:bwid.
There’s also leisure=swimming_area, which may apply to some designated bathing waters, e.g.
I’ve started to add Scotland’s designated bathing waters to the map. I am using the url:bathing_water tag (found on Taginfo) to link to the SEPA page about them. Maybe the OSM apps of the future will be able to show some information about them, such as water quality, or at least link to it.
There’s a layer available under Open Government License that lets me see the polygons as an overlay in JOSM, but I’ve just been adding them as nodes. The Strava heatmap also has a swimming layer which is useful for node placement (I try to place the node roughly where most people would actually go in the water, just below the coastline).
I also look for pictures on Wikimedia Commons while I am at it and add those too. I also check on aerial imagery to make sure it’s really just a “bathing place” in OSM speak and not a “beach resort” or “public bath” (which to my knowledge don’t really exist in Scotland).
Now that I am writing this I am thinking it could be useful to add something like designation=bathing_water too to make the official status clear.