Thursday May 3 saw us on the first of our summer itinerant meetings where we strike out from our regular winter quarters of a regular pub in Birmingham, and go touring around the region. This has two benefits: it gets us taking advantage of the light evenings to go mapping for about an hour prior to our meeting and thereby improving some neglected areas, and it gets us closer to those mappers who find it inconvenient to get to the centre of Birmingham.
So we met up in the White Lion Inn in the little village of Hampton-In-Arden in Solihull close to Birmingham International Airport and Train station and roughly halfway between Birmingham and Coventry. We had picked the pub at random and it turned out to be great, with good food and real ales. It’s a 17th century inn and is a Listed Building.
The weather was foul so not much mapping got done, but we did get to meet some new people: Eike from Tamworth (tamritt) and Matt from Coventry (milliams). It was nice to meet people whose work you keep seeing as you edit.Perhaps the most interesting mapping “discovery” was a Coptic Orthodox church – one of only 12 in the whole country.
The conversation, as usual, ranged far and wide over all things mapping. We did come to a couple of decisions, however: we’re going to revamp the mappa mercia website and also to hold a small “hack” event, hopefully in conjunction with the local social media activists.
For those of you who picture Solihull as an affluent suburb of Birmingham famous only as the place where the world’s Land Rovers are manufactured and are surprised it has country villages: Solihull stretches between Birmingham and Coventry and some way south into Warwickshire and is probably as rural as it is urban – hence its official motto Urbs in Rure (Town in Country).
See you in Coventry next month! Watch the mappa mercia OSM wiki page for details of venue.
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