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

Comments (17)
Incorrect location of post code
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
Is this a full database as we have found some postcodes are missing from this list?
Data
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
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
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
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
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
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
But where are the related datasets for administrative ward, district, county and country area codes?
Counties
The full download available from https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html includes County
OS Boundary-Line, free on
OS Boundary-Line, free on their Opendata page. Updated (at last) to include to the 2009 boundary changes
Northern Ireland
Will this be expanded to include Northern Ireland at some point?
If so, when?
It's Great but...
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
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
What datum
But what datum did you use to convert from eastings and northings. WSG85 is the required to maintain accuracy
Well done
Seriously well done!!!!!
Post Code Data
Excellent to see this data freely available. Opportunities to build applications using current or home locations are now significantly increased.