[Talk-GB] UK street addressing

[Chris Hill]

On 20/12/2020 14:57, Colin Smale wrote:
>
> On 2020-12-20 15:41, Chris Hill wrote:
>
>> Addresses in OSM are not the same as Royal Mail's addresses. RM 
>> addresses are all about their processes for delivering post to 
>> delivery points. The postal town (Largertown in your example) is a 
>> convenience for RM that we have all been persuaded is useful, but RM 
>> have ceased to use postal towns for many years!
> Are you not thinking of Postal Counties? They were indeed deprecated 
> many years ago (1996), but the Post Town is AFAIK a mandatory 
> component of a postal address, and Wikipedia agrees: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_town 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_town>

No, Counties are still useful. The only reason RM no longer uses 
counties is that they depend on postcodes and street addresses to 
deliver. We are not confined to delivering using RM's infrastructure. 
Near to York there is a village called Dunnington, near to Hull there is 
another small village called Dunnington. Without postcodes the county is 
vital to reach the right place.

Long after RM say they no longer used counties, their PAF list, used 
across Britain to find addresses in the absence of a proper, Open 
address database,still has counties in it. People still quote my address 
as being in North Humberside. North Humberside never existed, Humberside 
was abolished in 1996! SO it is with postal towns, RM no longer use them 
but they still appear in their PAF and so get perpetuated in general 
use, even though they are useless and misleading.

Royal mail do not use postal towns and neither should OSM.

> -- 

cheers
Chris Hill (chillly)

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