On 30 November 2017 at 22:45, Daniel Koć <daniel@koć.pl> wrote:
> While making some cleaning in osm-carto we have found that leisure=common
> and leisure=village_green are probably not clear enough to show them any
> more. They both have deep roots in British law and history and are
> frequently misused, as far as I can tell.

I agree that those two leisure keys are somewhat odd, as they appear
to be based on a legal designation rather than physical
characteristics. However, that's probably not the full story in the
UK, as they're likely to be used for patches of land that have the
appearance of a typical common or village green, and thus would be
recognised as such by most residents, even if legally they're not. The
"village green" and "common" terms can be thought of as comparable to
other names for open spaces such as "recreation ground" and "park",
but distinct from a UK point of view. Some legal village greens and
commons could well be "recreation grounds" and some may be "parks" but
many will not be either in the British English usage sense.

To capture the legal designation of patches of land, I would recommend
using the designation=* key, with something like
designation=common_land and designation=village_green. (However, we
probably wouldn't want to automagically add these tags to all UK
leisure=common and leisure=village_green objects, as some of the uses
may be based on appearance and not legal status.) Access tags can also
be added to describe access rights. But in addition to this, we'd need
something to capture the physical state / utility of the area. Often
neither leisure=recreation ground nor leisure=park will fit the bill.
If not, then natural=heath, natural=grassland, or natural=meadow may
fit the bill for commons, but it would be a shame if we didn't have
something specific for village green type areas of maintained grass.

In conclusion, I think there are reasonable arguments in favour or
replacing leisure=common with more appropriate tags to describe the
legal status, physical condition and access rights. But I'm not sure
about village_green, as there's a physical/utility aspect captured
there that I think should be maintained, and I'm not sure that there's
an alternative tagging available at the moment.

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker

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