Today I have added the first Brand pages to londinium.com

These are pages that have 9 entries or more of the following tags

• Brand
• Name
• Operator

One issue i ran into straight away was brands with apostrophes in them. Eg Nando's, Mcdonald's, Sainsbury's, Papa John's and more.

Using this guide to Overpass API regex, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL

My solution for now is to only match the start of the term, so I use Sainsbury, Nando etc. with the following regex overpass api query:

(nwr["name"~"^{{$brand}}"];  nwr["brand"~"^{{$brand}}"];  nwr["operator"~"^{{$brand}}"]; );

This method also allows the query to match Tesco, Tesco Metro, Tesco Express all from the Tesco query.

To investigate all the brands, names and operators, i once again created a database import script to create a mysql table for brands and extracted the fields from the osm json.

To find the most common brands I used this sql query:

SELECT LOWER(brand) , brand, COUNT(brand) as cnt  
FROM brands
GROUP BY brand
HAVING cnt > 9

This provided the following with at least 10 entries for my London area

Asda    210
Domino's    184
Boots   144
Lloyds Bank 138
Tesco Express   95
Wetherspoon 90
Pret A Manger   65
Premier Inn 54
Costa   53
Sainsbury's Local   50
Harvester   49
Sainsbury's 47
Starbucks   46
Hamptons International  43
Co-op Food  42
HSBC UK 42
Primark 41
Subway  39
Argos   38
McDonald's  36
Caffè Nero  34
Nando's 33
PizzaExpress    31
Bupa    29
Waitrose    28
Tesco   27
Holland & Barrett   25
Morrisons   24
Bairstow Eves   24
M&S Simply Food 22
Tesco Extra 22
Toby Carvery    22
Mail Boxes Etc. 22
Iceland 21
Marks & Spencer 21
KFC 20
Post Office 19
Esso    19
Boots Opticians 19
WHSmith 18
Toni & Guy  18
Nationwide  18
CTD Tiles   17
CeX 17
Better  17
Oxfam   17
Peacocks    17
Specsavers  17
Travelodge  17
Greggs  16
itsu    16
NatWest 16
Cotswold Outdoor    16
Zizzi   16
Papa John's 15
ALDI    15
Cancer Research UK  15
Screwfix    15
Hall & Woodhouse    15
Pizza Hut   15
Hilton  14
Wagamama    14
Spar    14
Superdrug   14
PureGym 14
Pets at Home    14
Furniture Village   14
Honest Burgers  14
Snappy Snaps    13
Five Guys   13
Krispy Kreme    13
Lidl    12
Ryman   12
Decathlon   12
3 Store 12
Nisa Local  12
Joe & The Juice 12
Waterstones 12
Côte Brasserie  12
Burger King 11
Office  11
Santander   11
Little Waitrose 11
Wickes  11
Kwik Fit    11
John Lewis  11
EE  11
Paul    11
Prezzo  10
TK Maxx 10
Bill's  10
Lush    10
Coral   10
Shell   10
The Gym 10
Sports Direct   10
Wilko   10
New Look    10
Game    10
Costco  10
William Hill    10
Knight Frank    10
Next    10
Farmfoods   10
Halifax 10

These are all linked from the frontpage on londinium.com

Many of these chains dont have the fields for every branch, which can be fixed by adding the correct brand in the OpenStreetMap system. I can do this for you. get in touch if you would like help improving the data stored in this open source map system.

If you would like to contact me with this form on londinium.com, ilminster.net or via Twitter @andylondon