Help locate unlocated postboxes – the Royal Mail supplied a list of every postboxes location, but unfortunately, it did not have useful co-ordinates, only postcodes or sub-postcodes and some textual data. Look up the postboxes near you by entering the first half of your postcode, locate one whose location you know on the map, pick which postbox you’ve located, and submit. The pages also include postbox last collection times, if we know them. http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ Dataset Name: Royal Mail Post Boxes Dataset URL: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/location_of_every_post_box_that Dataset Provider: Royal Mail
Comments (6)
An alternative
Shiply also provides a similar tool here: http://www.shiply.com/postbox-finder.php. I would say it has better look than Dracos version.
Great Website! And I thought
Great Website! And I thought government initiatives like this always fail.
Postbox Finder Uk (iPhone)
This is a popular alternative iPhone app
Http://www.software101.co.uk/postbox-finder-uk
Social media / mobile uses
This would be great as an app for iphone/android & symbian
The amount of times I have been in an unknown area and not know where the nearest post box was.
Re: iphone and android app
@Anonymous, I've been using this on Android for a while now, check out: http://www.elbatrop.com/postboxes
Open Data?
This wasn't as a result of data being published voluntarily, it was dragged out of Royal Mail kicking and screaming via a Freedom of Information request. The resulting data set was appalling. The Dracos site was needed, not to display the data, which is a simple enough task, but to crowd-source enough data to make the RM dataset even vaguely useful. Nice work Dracos, but hardly a beacon of OpenData from Royal Mail, in fact a model of how to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request and yet supply as little useful data as possible.