OpenStreetMap
who has the "ground truth" and is there any logic behind Irish house numbers?
Posted by b-unicycling on 3 April 2022 in English.I went house number surveying with StreetComplete yesterday in Callan, Co. Kilkenny. They have some very strange house numbering there, I can tell you.
One case, where whoever screwed the numbers on the door got them mixed up, so the sequence goes 34, 35, 63, 37 etc. But that’s what’s on the door, so that’s how I mapped it.
Another case, where the sequence is out of order, but presumably, because the houses got their number in the order they were built in.
Then I continued along Mill Street into what would eventually become Collins Park with a sign of the name in English and Irish in a wall (mapillary), so at least, I had some idea of the street name. However, the numbering continued from Mill Street (with ridiculously high numbers for Ireland, if I may add). I decided to ask the resident of no. 462 what street he lived on, and his answer was “The sat nav says Collins Park.” Very likely (everybody I know who isn’t a mapper uses it), that means GoogleMaps. So, what street do I put under addr:street? Do I follow the logic of the sequencing and give his house addr:street=Mill Street, yet adding “Collins Park” as the name to highway=street or do I follow the local’s information which in this case is very, very likely taken from Google? And which could easily lead to duplicate numbers for the same street?
I’ve done it the other way around for now, but I’m not happy with it.
A similar problem occurred elsewhere, where the name of the street “Green Lane” presumably continues from where I saw the only sign (sorry, no photograph, but it’s the street that led/ leads to the Fair Green), but the sequence on one side of the road continues from Mill Street, but across the road, one of the houses had “2 Kingscourt” (mark the different spelling from the actual street name - Kings Court - , FFS, isn’t anything easy in Callan?!). After my tagging, the houses on either side belong to different streets which they are not physically on.
Note also, that the houses on either side of the wall here- north and south of it seem to be belonging to the same numbering sequence, but not a single sign of a street name anywhere to be found.
I also don’t really know which addr:street to add to the houses from “Innisfree” to (presumably) no. 7 (no sign on the door) here, because Bolton Green already has a 1-7, definitely 5-7 anyway.
Thank God for eircodes…
Discussion
Comment from alan_gr on 5 April 2022 at 07:39
Having grown up in Ireland, this all seems quite normal to me. The houses on our road were numbered 1, 2, 3, no number, no number, no number, 4, 5, 6. The ones with numbers had been built at the same time, after the unnumbered ones. I think the numbers were really just plot numbers used by the builder, but my parents and a few neighbours stuck up plaques with the numbers, so that became the address. Generally the postman would know the names of the residents. In those days it was quite rare to receive a delivery other than through the official postal system. This was in a suburb of Dublin, so it’s not just a rural thing.
So, I wouldn’t expect any particular “logic” except where houses have all been built as part of the same development. Your Collins Park / Mill Street example sounds like it might be a similar situation to my parent’s house - the numbers might originally come from some kind of identifier used by a developer/builder, and the unusually high numbers may have had some logic in that context.
One of the justifications given for introducing Eircode was that 35% of addresses in Ireland are not unique, so don’t expect to be able to map unique addresses using name/number/street/location. We have jumped from probably one of the least precise addressing systems in Europe to one of the most precise in one go, skipping the intermediate step of “official” street addresses.
Comment from SK53 on 9 April 2022 at 16:21
Worth noting that high house numbers are not uncommon in parts of rural Northern Ireland: the numbers seem to relate to distance along the road rather than straightforward sequential numbering. Picked up from open data on schools, food hygiene & solar farm locations.
Comment from obyrnegps on 10 April 2022 at 14:47
In the Republic for much of our history, there were no national regulations on house numbering or street naming, just a single guidance document issued in 1971. This lead to local authorities and developers developing their own practices. At one stage there were 47 local authorities in the state; County Councils, Corporations, and Town Councils. There was also a practice of providing social housing through making available a site to a qualified person to have a house built on it. These sites had reference numbers that frequently ended up on the house because there were processes that started with allocation and ended with a completed house (e.g. land transfer, building contracts, utility connection etc.). Each local authority had its own way of referencing and numbering such sites - by street, by electoral division, by civil parish etc. Sometimes these processes occurred at a different pace for different individuals effecting the sequence on numbers. It’s the way things were done at the time.
Comment from b-unicycling on 10 April 2022 at 22:56
Thanks for your informed comments. It must make it difficult for the census people (and for us).