[Tagging] Deprecating of leisure=common and leisure=village_green

[Colin Smale]

Strictly speaking "common land" in England and Wales is a kind of access
qualifier, and doesn't imply anything about land use, surface covering
or ownership. It's a bit like "public footpath", in that the rights are
(to some extent) enshrined in law. 

So leisure=common would indeed be technically speaking a bit strange in
England/Wales, although saying "let's go play/for a walk/... on the
common" are (were, at least) quite normal. See wikipedia [1] for an
explanation of the status of common land in the UK. At [2] there is some
government guidance for England. 

Town and Village Greens *can* be registered as such to give them some
degree of protection (e.g. against development). They may also be Common
Lands at the same time, but they may not. So if landuse=village_green is
indeed about land use, then it may be correct in that regard but that is
orthogonal to the legal status of the land in question. Lots of info
about TVGs from the Open Spaces Society at [3]. 

--colin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land 

[2] https://www.gov.uk/common-land-village-greens 

[3] http://www.oss.org.uk/what-we-do/village-greens/ 

On 2017-12-01 11:03, Simon Poole wrote:

> A large number of landuse=village_green seem to be due to an import in
> the Czech Republic, where is has been used for essentially any grassy
> area. Lots of the leisure=common seem to be actually be leisure=park
> with the exception of the HOT helicopter "landing areas".  I would
> suggest that maybe fixing the obvious nonsense uses of both tags first
> and then re-evaluating might be a better strategy (naturally not
> rendering both might supply additional motivation to  fix the issues).
> 
> Simon
> 
> Am 30.11.2017 um 23:45 schrieb Daniel Koć: 
> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> Both are very popular - 57k and 86k uses, respectively - and still
>> growing:
>> 
>> https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5439713/33458839-19814f9c-d628-11e7-92fd-b51326fa8b25.png
>> 
>> That means that maybe such tagging should be discouraged and replaced
>> to not spread the confusion.
> 
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