OvertureMaps / OvertureMaps/data

GB: no Greater London layer; London locality parented under Westminster

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Description

In Great Britain, Overture’s admin tree is only country → home nation → county. There is no Greater London (and no other English metro wrappers like Greater Manchester or the West Midlands). London boroughs are typed as counties hanging directly off England.

The locality named London is a separate place record: OSM’s place=city node at Charing Cross (n107775). Overture parents that locality under Westminster, because the point sits inside the City of Westminster. That same row is tagged as capital of England and of the United Kingdom, with a population of about 8.9 million — so it is clearly meant to be the capital city, not a neighbourhood of Westminster. It has no division_area polygon and nothing is parented under it.

Checked on release 2026-08-19.0:

  • GB has 1 country, 4 regions (the home nations), 216 counties, and zero macroregion / macrocounty.
  • No division named Greater London.
  • London locality 316096ba-fc3f-40a9-9991-5a70f28dddab → parent Westminster county 35097f38-1580-48a2-9e35-3b1b007b1aef.
  • Boroughs such as Croydon, Camden, Hackney, and the City of London parent to England, not to London.

OSM does have the missing layer at admin_level=5:

That is the slot Overture’s docs describe as macrocounty (“a bundle of counties”). The guide already notes that macrocounty / macroregion should be present but are currently miscategorized.

What we’d expect

  1. A Greater London division (likely macrocounty) from the GLA boundary, with a polygon.
  2. London boroughs and the City of London parented under that, then England.
  3. The capital locality “London” not sitting under Westminster — Greater London or England as parent, and a polygon so it is not point-only.

This is awkward for search: people mean Greater London when they pick “London”, but that locality does not contain the boroughs, and its breadcrumb reads Westminster → England.

Same shape of problem as the Berlin city node under Mitte (#441), Kowloon under a district (#442), major cities missing division_area (#235), and subtype=borough never being used (#443).

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the guide's note on macrocounty and macroregion, then inspect the GB records from release 2026-08-19.0 alongside OSM relations 175342 and 65606. Done means Greater London has a polygon and contains its boroughs, while the London locality has an appropriate parent and polygon without being nested under Westminster.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
data
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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