Code-Point® Open

Posted by Department for Communities and Local Government on 17/02/2011 17 comments

Code-Point Open is a postal geography dataset that features a set of geographically referenced points that represent each of the 1.7 million postcode units in Great Britain. The centre of the postcode unit is derived from the precise coordinates of addresses sharing the same postcode unit in Ordnance Survey’s large-scale address database. Licence detail: UK Crown Copyright with data.gov.uk rights; see www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendata/licence for further information

Overview

Released	2010-04-01
Last updated	2009-11
Tags	code coordinate data map open ordnance-survey os point post unit
Department	Department for Communities and Local Government
Published by	Department for Communities and Local Government
Published via	Ordnance Survey

Resources (download)

Download	20 Mb download (estimated) View on Zoho
	Full description

Details

Name	os-code-point-open
Licence	UK Open Government Licence (OGL)
Geographic coverage	England Scotland Wales
Geographical granularity	Great Britain
Precision	1m resolution

Contact information

Team	Ordnance Survey Customer Service Centre
	Give feedback to department

Add new comment

Comments (17)

Incorrect location of post code

Tue, 31/01/2012 - 23:59 — Anonymous (not verified)

The post code m7 3br is incorrectly assigned to southmendfield road rather than blyton lane both in Salford? How can this be corrected. Blyton lane is located in a new estate.

Data

Thu, 19/01/2012 - 11:07 — Rowen Squibb (not verified)

Is this a full database as we have found some postcodes are missing from this list?

Data

Thu, 19/01/2012 - 12:21 — chetanpatel |

Moderator

Hi Rowen Thanks for getting in touch with the data.gov.uk team I will pass your query on to the data publisherKind regards

Chetan

Data.gov.uk Team

boundaries

Fri, 20/05/2011 - 05:16 — Anonymous

Good to see the point data and sector/district boundaries opened up.

This is great, but doesn't go far enough - we need the postcode unit boundaries for this data to be truly useful. I work for a voluntary sector organisation that provides public service but doesn't have the resource to buy point boundaries and does not come under the free public sector licence.

Please release the unit boundary data free too.

Convert to Lat/Lon & import to SQL Server

Tue, 25/01/2011 - 22:13 — Anonymous

Great to have this data available!

I've uploaded some code to GitHub to load the dataset into SQL Server 2008 - strips out the quotes and spaces from the post codes, converts the Eastings & Northings to Lat/Lon WGS84 (via third party, open source library) before then loading the data into the database. Stores the post code with the lat/lon coordinates and with the location stored as a POINT in a GEOGRAPHY typed column.

https://github.com/AdaTheDev/Ordnance-Survey-Code-Point-Data-Importer

Scope - lack of Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Island

Wed, 22/12/2010 - 11:43 — Anonymous

While the data is good as far as it goes, it does not go far enough. For business reasons we require the Northern Ireland (BT), Isle of Man (IM) and Channel Islands (GY and JE) postcodes. Are there any plans to include them and if so, what are the expected timescales?

Not in Ordnance Survey jurisdiction

Wed, 12/01/2011 - 10:44 — Anonymous

Northern Ireland postcode data is under the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland. It uses the Ireland grid reference system, which is a different projection to that used by Ordnance Survey for Great Britain. See http://www.dfpni.gov.uk/lps/index/gi/pointer.htm for information about the NI Pointer data set.

Similarly Isle of Man and Channel Islands are under their own jurisdictions - these islands are not part of the UK and have their own governments, and any UK legislation has to be extended to them through Orders-in-Council. Therefore, Open Data does not necessarily apply to them. For the Isle of Man see http://www.gov.im/transport/planning/cartography.xml?menuid=6921. For Guernsey see http://www.digimap.gg/caf. For Jersey try http://www.digimap.je/datasets. The Channel Islands also fall outside the OSGB grid and it appears they use WGS84 directly.

Code-Point Open version numbering

Thu, 11/11/2010 - 08:48 — Anonymous

Shouldn't the Overview information above be updated to reflect new versions of this dataset?

The OS website lists the current version as 08/2010!

Its good to have this data

Wed, 22/09/2010 - 15:32 — Anonymous

But where are the related datasets for administrative ward, district, county and country area codes?

Counties

Thu, 08/12/2011 - 16:06 — Keith Macdonald (not verified)

The full download available from https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html includes County

OS Boundary-Line, free on

Fri, 20/05/2011 - 05:25 — Anonymous

OS Boundary-Line, free on their Opendata page. Updated (at last) to include to the 2009 boundary changes

Northern Ireland

Thu, 01/07/2010 - 11:33 — Anonymous

Will this be expanded to include Northern Ireland at some point?
If so, when?

It's Great but...

Fri, 28/05/2010 - 23:33 — Anonymous

It's great to see some of this data being opened up finally but it's worth reiterating that its only a GB dataset which excludes Northern Ireland, The Channel Islands and The Isle of Man. I wrote a bit about the problem.

Essentially in it's incomplete state, it's unusable for any serious application

Other formats

Wed, 05/05/2010 - 11:37 — Anonymous

This is truly excellent.

I have imported and cleaned the data (removing " characters from some postcodes), trimmed it down to just postcode, long + lat and converted it into the following formats:

SQL Server 2005 (separate lon/lat cols)
SQL Server 2008 (using geography type)
MongoDB - in a format where you can use the its spatial features

Data and code is available from:

http://github.com/HowardvanRooijen/Ordnance-Survey-OpenData