UK Postcodes

UK Postcodes

This repository contains a CSV of UK postal out codes. It contains some mappings to English regions that were not on the original.

It is not clear whether the Latitude and Longitude coordinates use the Airy or the WSG85 Ellipsoid and datum. An action to find out and make it clear as necessary. The WSG85 coordinates will ultimately be in this set.

Some notes on the columns of postcodes.csv:

• postcode The outward part of the postcode.
• easting The numeric eathing value (whole metres from the false origin, up to 7 digits)
• northing The numeric northing value (whole metres from the false origin, up to 7 digits)
• latitude The latitude angle in degrees.
• longitude The longitude angle, in degrees.
• city The town or city.
• county The county or municiple region or city conurbation.
• country_code The country code - three letter.
• country_name The name of the country.
• iso3166-2 The ISO country code.
• region_code The region code (non-official).
• region_name The region name.

England is divided into the following regions:

• North East
• North West
• Yorkshire and the Humber
• East Midlands
• West Midlands
• East of England
• London
• South East
• South West

These are detailed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_England

From what I can tell, there are no standard or accepted codes for the regions of England, so those listed in uk-regions.csv and postcodes.csv should not be considered official; they are just defined here to link up the data.

For the original source, see: http://www.dangibbs.co.uk/journal/free-uk-postcode-towns-counties-database

There are many postcodes listed without a town or region. There are also some towns or cities that are not accurate or are ambiguous, since a postcode can span more than one town. No attempt is being made to clean up these two aspects at this time. My main concern was mapping cities, regions and postcodes to a grid reference for a job board, so people can search for jobs within a radius of a given point (the job seeker's postcode or town).

It is not clear where the grid references (easting/northing and lat/long) for the postcode areas comes from. The OSGB publishes the easting/northing down to 1m for each full postcode, so the mean position can be calculated to any higher-level collection of postcodes. For example, the mean locations of "NE26 2**", "NE26" and "NE". I suspect this is the data that is logged here, which can probabaly be calculated by script and supplied as a series of CSV files. I just want to know the source and whether any of this data can be regenerated when source data is updated.

ons_code and gss_code columns are synonymous. ONS uses GSS Codes, also known as ONS codes. GSS seems to be a newer name, and will save confusion between the old ONS codes and the new GSS codes, so we will use the GSS term where possible.

The six metropolitan districts are also known as metropolitan counties. Terminology tends to change depending on where you look.

The data in england-metropolitan-boroughs.csv has been merged into county_iso3166_2_gb.csv Further GSS codes will be added to county_iso3166_2_gb.csv where available - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONS_coding_system

References

• http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/government-statistical-service/
  Government Statistical Service - we are drawing on codes used to define geographic areas, but not the political-only or health-related areas (such as wards and NHS regions) at this stage.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONS_coding_system
  Overview of the coding system that we afre pulling in, with the older OS and ISO coding systems.
• http://www.doogal.co.uk/
  Awesome combination of free OS and NGS data. This is what the government should have done with the data, and this site embarrassingly shows them up. No idea why it has taken me so long to find this site.