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Locations of Metropolitan Police Boxes and Posts

Re.the list of Met Police Boxes/Posts. The original would of have compiled during the early 1990s, but it has been siginificantly updated, amended and corrected by myself since then. I go abroad thsi Tues (13th) until 03 Jan when I will be able to feel in as much info concerning this subject, including dates and which Boxes were replaced by the Mk3 (and any other historical info that I have to hand). Hopefully (computer knowledge allowing) I will be able to download this info to the site early next year. i am actually Norwich based in th wilds of Norfolk. Rgds
Mike
 
That would be wonderful!

Any info you can supply is always welcome. Your list has been absolutely invaluable. I'm in the midst of using the data to chart all the locations we haven't already matched to photos, along with proofing our transcription of the list.

Most welcome (at least at the moment) would be knowledge about anything at locations P35 through P45, as either the Met had lost (or misplaced) a page from the list, it somehow got missed in all the paperwork in the file when dalekoracle scanned it, or the numbers actually do skip from P34 to P46.

There are also a couple sites we've found that don't appear to be on the list at all, at least as we have it. One is the http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=3803 (theoretically Z division) and another is the http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=4011.0 (theoretically in P division, so most suspicious as being one of the "missing" numbers).

Regardless, well met and good to see you on board!
:D
 
Scarfwearer said:
Welcome aboard!
Are you going abroad right away?

Crispin
Click to expand...

Completely off Topic....Must say Crispin I just stumbled across your home-made films!!
They are excellent...Well Done (wish I could do the same with "my shed" in the back garden!)  ;D
 
The missing Boxes P34-P46:
P34  Honor Oak Road, north side at Hengrave Road, south side (Siren)    East Dulwich Sub-div
P35  Sydenham Hill, east side 15 yds north of London Road                    "          "          "
P36  Dulwich Village, east side 20 yds south of Court Lane                    "          "          "
P37  Dulwich Road, south side 10 yds north of Norwood Road    (Siren)    "          "        "
P38  NW corner of Champion Hill and Grove Lane                    (Siren)    "          "        "
P39  Peckham Rye, east side 12 yds south of Philip Road                        "          "          "
P40  SW corner of Peckham Rye East and Homestall Road                      "        "          2
P41  Gibbon Road, east side opposite Hollydale Road                              Lewisham sub-div
P42  New Cross Road, south side 40 yds east of Pepys Road                          "      "
P43  Lewisham Way, south side 5 yds west of Tyrwhitt Road                          "      "
P44  Lewisham High Street, east side 31 yds south of Loampit Vale (Siren)        "      "
P45  Crofton Park Road, east side 20 yds south of Ewhurst Road                    "        "
P46  Dartmouth Road, east side 118 yds north of Kirkdale        (Siren)            "        "

P46 was sited on the forecourt of (bombed out) Sydenham Police Station during 1941 and was removed in 1946 when the Police Statuion re-opened

Hope this helps, Mike 
 
Fantastic info!  So there was a page missing after all.  I was convinced for various reasons that the jump in numbers was incidental and that there weren't any missing records.  I am glad to be proved wrong.

Mike, can you confirm or deny that the numbering system was used for other police "premises" than boxes or posts?  Some parts of the divisional lists don't start at zero (for example A Division starts listing boxes at A51). 

Although I realise you probably won't see this till you're back.

Cheers

Dave
 
petewilson said:
Completely off Topic....Must say Crispin I just stumbled across your home-made films!!
They are excellent...Well Done (wish I could do the same with "my shed" in the back garden!)  ;D
Click to expand...

Thanks! :D They're a bit 'specialised' so I don't advertise them much. (The topic is http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?topic=937 if anyone's wondering what this is about.)

Crispin
 
Despite exhaustive research into the numbering system, it would appear that only Police Boxes and Posts were numbered (Sirens were also, but they adopted the number of the adjacent Box/Post) or un-numbered if they were attached to a Police Station. As you correctly pointed out, A Divn started at A51, C at C61, D at D71 and E at E91. There is no recorded documentation as to why this numbering was utilised, but I can definately confirm that A1-50, C1-60, D1-70 and E1-90 were never used.

I fly out tomorrow, but I will touch base on my return early Jan and hope to be as much help as possible. All the best for now, Mike
 
I think your help has progressed things forward for now.  It will keep these chaps busy for the next two month upon your return. Keep safe!
Bill "the Doctor" Rudloff
 
Wonderful - many, many thanks Mike!

I see that both the Lewisham High Street Box and the Dulwich Village Box are on there - Yay!

I do notice, though, that the two repeats in your new list (P34 and P46 were in the Met List as copied so we had those) seem to show some differences from what we already have:

Old from copied Met List --

P34 Box A.R.W. Siren 13-Aug-34 60 Junction of Honor Oak Park, south side and Hengrave Road, north side Forest Hill East Dulwich

New from plumbly7 --

P34    Honor Oak Road, north side at Hengrave Road, south side (Siren)     East Dulwich Sub-div

Sides of of the street are reversed in the new one and Honor Oak Park is changed to Honor Oak Road (I see on Google Maps that the road does change names, but it seems to indicate the change isn't until it hits Forest Hill Road so should theoretically still be Honor Oak Park at Hengrave Road). As a result of the North-South reversals, the corner would be radically different (and in fact there is no real "corner" on the North as it is a "T" junction) - which is correct?

Old from Met List --

P46 Box A.R.W. Siren 13-Aug-34 Dartmouth Road, east side 100 yards south of Suncroft Place on forecourt of Sydenham police station (closed) Sydenham East Dulwich

New from plumbly7 --

P46   Dartmouth Road, east side 118 yds north of Kirkdale         (Siren)            "         "

These seem to be self consistent, just measured from different directions - just very curious why the difference in description (rather than just a refinement) between the List from the Met and your updated one. In fact, very, very curious about your updated and amended list as a whole.  :o

We will very eagerly await your return - have a good trip!
 
All original Met Box and Met Post locations have now been nominally found and input into the database so they show up on the Metbox Map.

Take a look -- http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php/index.php?board=142

I will be verifying and refining as many locations (and their descriptions) as possible using Ordnance Survey Maps (where available) as time goes on, but most current errors are likely fairly minor. About 5% have already been map verified, plus another 20% or so via photos. A few locations are a bit speculative due to minimal or vague descriptions in the Met List, but these too will hopefully be verifiable one way or another.

Note that the City of London Post entries/locations are currently incomplete, but in the near future they should also be fully represented (their icons are light blue on the Map).
 
This is a truly amazing achievement! I'd actually never really expected that the database would get filled out.
A huge thank-you to you Banzai and those others who've help us to get this far.

Looking at the map with nearly 800 of them in London it looks like you were never more than a short walk from one of them (much like Starbucks in Seattle in the present!)
Just managing the phone network for them must have been a non-trivial operation.
It also certainly puts our current density of CCTV cameras in perspective.

Crispin
 
hb88banzai said:
Note that the City of London Post entries/locations are currently incomplete, but in the near future they should also be fully represented (their icons are light blue on the Map).
Click to expand...

Challenge accepted.

Although I have my own map all done up in Google's "My Maps", I'm not sure how to go about getting the rest of the London Posts on the database map. Currently I've only made entries for those that I have had Photos of.

Do I need to make blank entries on every Post on the list even if all I have is the general location and the number of the post in that area? 
 
starcross said:
Although I have my own map all done up in Google's "My Maps", I'm not sure how to go about getting the rest of the London Posts on the database map. Currently I've only made entries for those that I have had Photos of.

Do I need to make blank entries on every Post on the list even if all I have is the general location and the number of the post in that area? 
Click to expand...

The way things are currently programmed you would indeed have to do separate Topics for each Post to have it show up; however, there are other, more elegant ways of doing it.

I was going to contact Crispin with the thought of either integrating the CoL posts into the MetBox database with a bit of programming magic to still make them show up as CoL light blue instead of Met dark blue, or to set up a separate CoL database. Regardless, this would also mean disconnecting the current links between the individual CoL articles and the MetBox Map and relinking them to the database (new or old) the same way it is currently done with Met Boxes and Met Posts.

I think I prefer the idea of having them all in one database (perhaps with the IDs prefixed with CoL instead of a Division letter, eg CoL42) as there have been a few occasions where we went looking for a Post in the database only to find out it was a CoL Post - this would negate that happenstance.

I will PM Crispin with the idea, so probably best to hold off on doing the entries until we have it sorted. It would mean putting in a brief description of the location together with any dating info you have along with the Google Maps URL, but at least we only have to do that once (barring corrections).
 
I added some columns to the board listing for the http://tardisbuilders.com/index.php?board=139.0 board so that the board itself becomes a database and the topics in it become the records (with a little magic to edit the fixed fields).
Under the hood they're pretty similar, as in fact the whole forum is actually a giant relational database with a number of tables.
You can sort on columns in the CoL board the same as you can in the metbox database, by clicking on the column headers.

So yes, currently the way to add posts when you have no picture is to create a topic for it with very little in it.

I was actually planning ahead with this for:
  • The Edinburgh boxes
  • The Glasgow boxes
  • The various other kinds of boxes in other cities/counties
  • Anything else that comes along that needs this kind of treatment.

As it is, when someone wants to do that we can just add another board that functions like a separate database table.
I was working on the assumption that you wouldn't want these in the same table with the metbox database!

Having said all that, I'm at your service. :) If you'd rather they were in one table, I have no problem with that.

We can certainly use the Division field in the metbox database to distinguish the CoL posts, and picking up the light colour from the CoL division name would not be hard. We could also generalise it to include boxes from other cities (if we ever collect those here) and use filters to select particular cities or types of box. Or we could keep boxes from other cities separate.

If you do want to transfer the CoL posts to the Metbox database, I'll make the map software select the light blue colour for the CoL 'division'.

Crispin
 
Lots of possibilities.

Some input from any and all concerned parties would be most welcome.

I think I would personally prefer all Boxes & Posts from other Cities or Counties to be separate from the Metbox Database itself, but City of London really seems to be a special case. Over and above the geographic overlap, they seem to have actually converted some of the Met Posts after removal to use in the CoL system (and vice-versa for the replacement Piccadilly Circus Post). So it kind of seems logical to include them in the Metbox Database, even though the CoL system actually predates it.

Thoughts?
 
Just as a note - google maps can export data as a KML file with a whole list of markers in it. With a little work I can probably arrange to import that into our database. If it's just a handful it's probably easier to manually transcribe them, but if there are a lot, a little mechanical help might make it easier.

Let me know.

Crispin
 
More than 60, so not a small number; however, I note that Starcross has the central London area Met Posts mixed in with the CoL Posts on his map, so some filtering might be necessary.
 
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