Street numbers, substreet and parentstreet

How do I tag an address like the following?

3 Argyle Close
45 High Street

That is, the entire close has the address 45 High Street (the entrance to the close is between nos. 43 and 47).

Having read the Wiki page on addresses in the United Kingdom, I know I can put Argyle Close in addr:substreet and High Street in addr:parentstreet, but where should the 45 go if addr:housenumber is already used for the 3?

Looking around other addresses in the area, addresses were tagged long before the substreet/parentstreet tagging scheme was invented. Mappers then didn’t tag the 45 High Street part at all. But I am thinking with the new tagging scheme there must be a way to tag this?

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I’d probably just fudge it and put addr:housenumber=3+ addr:street=Argyle Close + addr:parentstreet=45 High Street if the ‘45’ was necessary.

It’s not right, but it might be the least wrong option we have at the moment?

Alternately I suppose you could use addr:unit=3 + addr:substreet=Argyle Close addr:housenumber=45 + addr:street=High Street. But I think that might be misusing addr:unit.

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Whatever you end up with, addr:full=* would be a good idea for something like this, since data consumers probably won’t be expecting it in the UK. It’s probably more of an edge case than the very common hierarchical house numbers in urban Vietnam.

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I’ve not seen an address looking quite like that before. It seems really odd to have a sub-street that has a house-number on the parent street.

If “Argyle Close” was more like a building rather than sounding like a street name, then probably the way to go would be:

addr:unit=3
addr:housename=Argyle Close
addr:housenumber=45
addr:street=High Street

But as it is I’m not sure. The above would be a bit of an abuse of housename, but it at least would lead to the correct address being reconstructed.

Could you link to the place you’re talking about on OSM, so people can take a look at what’s there and how it’s been mapped already?

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I’m wondering how the heck PAF stores it.

I really want to know what’s going on here with the layout! Is it a situation where the letterboxes for 1-5 Argyle Close can only be got to through 45 High Street specifically, and 6-10 must be accessed via some other entrance on High Street - or perhaps by the real Argyle Close street, which is usually got to some other way?

Basically, does the 45 matter? Is it significant in how you physically get to the delivery point? If not, then it’s probably

addr:housenumber=3
addr:street=Argyle Close
addr:parentstreet=High Street

Thanks for the suggestions.

The specific address above was made up, here is a real example of a business, here is another one (scroll to bottom for address) that gives their address in this format. Neither were mapped in OSM until I noticed them yesterday.



This is what it looks like - note the plaques, with the numbers numbers, 22 and 117, and also the 117 carved in stone in the second picture, it must be quite old.

There isn’t a single property at 22 High Street or at 117 High Street. There’s only the close (narrow alleyway) which is accessed through an archway like this and then usually opens up to a courtyard with multiple buildings. All the entrances that the close gives access to share this address. Some are private and gated, some are adopted footways. Some lead through to other streets.

I suppose giving the close a house number would have been useful in the old days, even if you didn’t know where Argyle Close was you would be able to find 45 High Street.

OSM has address nodes on the footway in the format addr:housenumber=45, addr:street=High Street, like here, so someone searching for 45 High Street will be able to find the close. But at the moment the properties down the close are just mapped in the format addr:housenumber=3, addr:street=Argyle Close, and I thought the substreet/parentstreet scheme might give me a way to put the complete address into structured tags.

I don’t know how the PAF stores it but it does: if you type 22 High Street into the Royal Mail postcode finder, it shows the full address for each of the results.

Interestingly, the council don’t bother. The council data (the definitive source of addresses) omits the High Street bit, and consequently there’s no record for 22 High Street, only a record for each of the properties in the close.

(Not that I can use either of them for mapping)

It’s a little depressing that that first example uses OSM as a basemap, but didn’t actually add themselves to OSM. They seem to have placed their marker one alley over from where it’s mapped in the OSM data too.

Aha. It’s a Scottish usage I should have been aware of. Means a common narrow alleyway in this sense, onto which more than one named building might back. It’s got a building-y sense, but it’s not actually a building.

Definition

Likely the first of these two senses of the word “close” (wiktionary).

  1. (Scotland) A very narrow alley between two buildings, often overhung by one of the buildings above the ground floor.
  2. (Scotland) The common staircase in a tenement.

Wikipedia adds:

Scottish tenements are constructed in terraces, and each entrance within a block is referred to as a close or stair—both referring to the shared passageway to the individual flats.

OK, so looking at Edinburgh, closes often have more than one entrance, sometimes on different streets (see Carrubber’s Close, also on High Street but also on Jeffrey Street. And closes are numbered, in and of themselves, on the relevant street. Mappers in Edinburgh seem to dispense with the close’s own address in delivery point on the close: see 4 Carrubber’s Close, which is down as

node 2977624484's tags
addr:city=Edinburgh
addr:country=GB
addr:housenumber=4
addr:street=Carrubber's Close

Always defer to the local mappers :wink: They’re not even using addr:parentstreet, since there’s two for this one and it probably doesn’t matter.

But what if it does matter, or you want to capture how people are giving their addresses out?

If I wanted to be really extra about it, I’d tag two things: one node for the final delivery point, normally the property’s entrance for these things:

name=Offbeat
addr:housenumber=1/8    # that's unusual in itself (see downthread)
addr:street=Bailie Fyfe's Close    # on this. OSM has an apostrophe for it :)
addr:parentstreet=High Street       # accessed via this.
addr:suburb=Royal Mile         # maybe
addr:city=Edinburgh
addr:postcode=EH1 1SW

And one element for the close itself, somehow, since someone might be asking “oh, and how do I find Bailie Fyfe’s Close then?”. I’d tag the entrance node or gate or whatever like

name=Bailie Fyfe's Close
addr:housenumber=107
addr:street=High Street
addr:suburb=Royal Mile
addr:city=Edinburgh
addr:postcode=EH1 1SW

Noting that James’ Court up on Lawnmarket has 3 separately signed “West Entry”, “Mid Entry”, and “East Entry” entrances. They seem to each have a number (493-495 Lawnmarket, apparently).

Seems flexible to me, and in keeping with what Edinburgh mappers are doing right now. I bet in practice you don’t often have to know the number of the close on its street to find your final address.

(The other possibility is to declare that each close-name element is an addr:building, and each final door’s number is an addr:unit, and then change the entire OSM map of Edinburgh or potentially all Scottish cities. I don’t really wanna suggest that though.)

The slightly more generic version of this is the addr:substreet tagging for groupings below street level (mentioned further up the thread).

Do we need a dedicated addr:parenthousenumber tag?

Updating earlier, the N/M form for the final number seems to identify flats within
 either buildings or staircases?, and is quite common. Also quite likely to trip up automated checkers.

Do we need a dedicated addr:parenthousenumber tag?

Heh. If only the Karlsruhe schema allowed for numbers at every level, and as many levels as we need (hello, Vietnam!)

🍿

Not a fan of addr:substreet, since it’s not that widely supported, and since there’s precisely nothing you can do with it that isn’t possible with the widely supported (addr:street + addr:parentstreet) or (addr:place + addr:parentstreet) combos. But I digress (and I shouldn’t)

Vietnam will be fine, apart from any uncertainty about whether to stuff the slashes in addr:housenumber=* or addr:street=*. As far as I can tell, the alleys there are just numbered according to the house at the beginning of the alley, but not separately named, so the combination of these two keys is enough to reconstruct a properly formatted full address, which is all users care about anyways. In that respect, Scotland wins this round of “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. :wink:

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