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How are UK postcodes formatted?

How are UK postcodes formatted?

Split a postcode into outward code, inward code, postcode area, district code, sub-district code, postcode sector and postcode unit. Updated 11 Jan 2021. The UK postcode consists of five to seven alphanumeric characters which was created by Royal Mail.

What is a postcode polygon?

Code-Point polygons represent postcode unit boundaries in Great Britain. The boundaries are derived from ADDRESS-POINT®, an Ordnance Survey product which provides a National Grid co-ordinate for each postal delivery address in Great Britain.

What is the correct postcode format?

Postcodes should always be in BLOCK CAPITALS as the last line of an address. Do not underline the postcode or use any punctuation. Leave a clear space of one character between the two parts of the postcode and do not join the characters in any way.

What is postcode sector?

A postcode sector combines a postcode area, a postcode district and a single character indicating the location’s inward code. There can be up to 10 different sectors within a postcode district and these are numbered 0-9.

How many postcode Outcodes are there in the UK?

There are approximately 1.71 million unit postcodes in the UK. The following is a list of the valid formats of postcode. An ‘A’ indicates an alphabetic character, an ‘N’ indicates a numeric character. and be left justified with a single space between the inward and outward components.

How are postcode areas worked out?

It is a hierarchical system, working from left to right — the first letter or pair of letters represents the area, the following digit or digits represent the district within that area, and so on. Each postcode generally represents a street, part of a street, or a single premises.

How accurate is a postcode?

The distance between the two estimates of location for each case were measured and it was found that 87.9% of the postal code locations were within 200 meters of the true address location (straight line distances) and 96.5% were within 500 meters of the address location (straight line distances).

What is a postcode area in UK?

A postcode area is the geographical unit and forms the initial characters of the alphanumeric UK postcode. There is a total of 124 postcode areas in the UK. We also provide Address Lists based on postcode areas.

Are there postcode shapefiles for the UK?

10 We’ve recently released reconstructed postcode boundaries in shapefile format for UK postcode areas, districts and sectors (reconstructed from unit postcode geocodes using Voronoi etc). They are free to use. Obviously the reconstruction is approximate and may not be suitable for all purposes.

Where can I get postal sector boundary polygons?

Our friends at Geolytix have created some beautiful hand edited Postal Sector boundary polygons from the GB based Code-Point ® Open, which you can download as open data here.

Are there polygons in the UK postcodes?

UK postcodes don’t cover polygons. They cover a set of individual delivery points which are not necessarily contiguous. It is certainly possible, given the co-ordinates for these delivery points, to describe a polygon such that all the co-ordinates are within that polygon.

Where can I get Free shapefile of the UK?

You can get free shapefile to download from https://www.igismap.com/united-kingdom-shapefile-download/. It’s completely free. Here you get polygon shapefile and shapefile of states. Share Improve this answer Follow edited Sep 29 ’18 at 7:12

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Ruth Doyle