On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Peter Heather wrote:

On Dec 3, 9:19*am, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Brian Watson wrote:
"Tom Anderson" wrote in message
h.li...

While pondering the nature of southwest London, i turned to OpenStreetMap:

http://openstreetmap.org/

I noticed that the main road heading out towards Portsmouth was very
straight - a Roman road, i assumed. I hadn't realised that. I followed it,
to see how far it went. And was quite surprised by the answer. It goes by
the name of Strutton Ground, and starts here, near Parliament:

Has anyone actually looked at the links i posted? Specifically, the second
one?

Well I have for one and it's a complete work of fiction. I'm surprised
no one else has commented already. The straight roman road that it shows
crossing the Thames and heading into Victoria

You mean Porto. The road shown on the map terminates in Porto. In
Portugal. Having crossed London, southern England, the English Channel,
France, the Bay of Biscay, and northern Spain.

Hence the remark about the Peninsular War.

simply doesn't exist.

Well, no.

Try looking at Multimap or any other 'proper' map. Openstreetmap can be
amended by anyone, a bit like Wikipedia,

I don't think it's quite as open as Wikipedia.

and someone (you perhaps?)

Certainly not!

has drawn your roman road on it, albeit it's been quite neatly done.

The fact that it's a straight line makes me suspect it's based on a simple
error or glitch: someone meant to enter a road linking (eg) points 100 and
734327, but typed 734372 for the end, which happens to be rather far way.
Possibly the sort of thing some simple validation steps would catch.

Strutton Ground does exist but not where it is shown and is an
interesting little street market right in the heart of London (and I
agree with Colin that the baguettes are pretty good!).

I'll have to try them. Maybe next time i'm in Portugal.

tom

--
Big Bang. No god. Fadeout. End. -- Stephen Baxter