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GB: no Greater London layer; London locality parented under Westminster #568

Description

@cloudb0x

In Great Britain, Overture’s admin tree is only country → home nation → county. There is no Greater London (and no other English metro wrappers like Greater Manchester or the West Midlands). London boroughs are typed as counties hanging directly off England.

The locality named London is a separate place record: OSM’s place=city node at Charing Cross (n107775). Overture parents that locality under Westminster, because the point sits inside the City of Westminster. That same row is tagged as capital of England and of the United Kingdom, with a population of about 8.9 million — so it is clearly meant to be the capital city, not a neighbourhood of Westminster. It has no division_area polygon and nothing is parented under it.

Checked on release 2026-08-19.0:

  • GB has 1 country, 4 regions (the home nations), 216 counties, and zero macroregion / macrocounty.
  • No division named Greater London.
  • London locality 316096ba-fc3f-40a9-9991-5a70f28dddab → parent Westminster county 35097f38-1580-48a2-9e35-3b1b007b1aef.
  • Boroughs such as Croydon, Camden, Hackney, and the City of London parent to England, not to London.

OSM does have the missing layer at admin_level=5:

That is the slot Overture’s docs describe as macrocounty (“a bundle of counties”). The guide already notes that macrocounty / macroregion should be present but are currently miscategorized.

What we’d expect

  1. A Greater London division (likely macrocounty) from the GLA boundary, with a polygon.
  2. London boroughs and the City of London parented under that, then England.
  3. The capital locality “London” not sitting under Westminster — Greater London or England as parent, and a polygon so it is not point-only.

This is awkward for search: people mean Greater London when they pick “London”, but that locality does not contain the boroughs, and its breadcrumb reads Westminster → England.

Same shape of problem as the Berlin city node under Mitte (#441), Kowloon under a district (#442), major cities missing division_area (#235), and subtype=borough never being used (#443).

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