People who understand London
Just one of my I wonder if you can come up with a better idea threads.
Basically this stems from a couple of correction threads we have running asking for London corrections:
http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showt...=4943#post4943
http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showt...=6542#post6542
It is explained a bit in there, but by way of some background. A pub is on our database, and has a number of elements that make it up, these elements help cluster it, for addresses they have a street and a town. The town operates as a way of grouping the pubs on our system, so Bristol is a town.
Just to complicate things a little more the town can either be a postal town in which case it shows under a county so Birmingham is a Postal town in the West Midlands, but Coleshill is a town in the Postal town of Birmingham. So in terms of navigating our system you would go Pubs Galore > West Midlands > Birmingham > Coleshill. And both Birmingham and Coleshill contain pubs.
Anyway this brings us to London, which is for me and Dave is a big mystery, to try and get it to work we dumped the Postal Towns once you are into the London postcodes and instead made each postcode its own Postal Town and gave them a name to offer some guidance, the names were taken from Wikipedia.
It is obvious this is confusing some of our Londoners who actually know London :), so I was wondering if there was a better system that would work for Londoners and non-Londoners alike. So if anyone has any bright ideas lets hear them.
Something that occurs to me is that we could make each postcode a Postal Town and then make the names towns in the Postal Towns, but that would mean you end up with SW1 being empty and just containing the districts of Pimlico, Belgravia, etc. Also I am guessing some of these districts broach more than 1 postcode so we are in danger of more than 1 district or misleading names.
What I think it needs:
- Should reference postcode (eg. SW1)
- Should be usable by people with or without knowledge of London
- Should not allow duplication of place names
- Pubs should only be listed once and can only have 1 town
It may be that there are just different bad solutions to this problem, and the maps certainly help but it is worth checking to see if anyone has any cooler ideas.