Code-Point with Polygons support

The product is updated quarterly and new customers receive the latest version.

GridLink® is a joint consortium dataset that provides geospatially referenced postcode data, consisting of UK postcodes, administration areas and health authority codes.

The GridLink® Consortium comprises Royal Mail®, Ordnance Survey®, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Land & Property Services (LPS) and National Records of Scotland (NRS). Each consortium member supplies component data to create the GridLink® dataset.

More often than not, this is the result of the recoding of an area by Royal Mail. This can happen for various reasons, usually because there are more postcodes required than there is capacity within the higher-level aggregations of postcodes, known as postcode sectors, districts and areas. The postcodes will therefore change, for example, from RG1 1AA to RG10 1AA.

Changes to Royal mail postcodes may result in some unit postcodes being deleted and therefore no longer represented in the product.

This is how the question is usually asked, but it is important to understand the difference between accuracy and resolution. Usually, the question is really asking about resolution.

Code-Point with polygons is derived from ADDRESS-POINT®, the Ordnance Survey dataset that provides National Grid (NG ref) coordinates for each postal delivery address in Great Britain, mainly to a 0.1metre resolution. The Thiessen process tessellates these points, then the address boundaries inside each postcode are dissolved away, leaving boundaries for the postcode units.

The polygons are aligned to the postcode sector boundaries exclusively produced and maintained by Geoplan® in association with Royal Mail.

GEOPLAN is a registered trademark of Geoplan Spatial Intelligence Limited. Royal Mail is a registered trademark of Royal Mail Group Plc

When used in an address the inward code (incode) should be separated from the outward code (outcode) by a single space, however, within the supplied Code-Point products there may be 0, 1 or 2 spaces between these two elements. The postcode field is set at seven characters. The varying number of spaces in this field is determined by the number of characters in the postcode and parameters within the production system that stipulate the use of seven characters. Instructions are provided within the User Guide for how to create single space postcodes.

Combining (concatenating) multiple CSV files
It may be beneficial to combine all CSV files to ensure that the user does not have to follow the import procedure for each of the individual files, which can be time consuming and repetitive. Here is an explanation of one way to combine all the individual CSV files in to a single file by using a .bat batch file.
To use the batch function:

• Copy the following text and paste it into a new Notepad document: copy *.csv outputfile.csv
  N.B., outputfile.csv can be any user defined file name with the extension .csv, e.g. CPO_National.csv
• Save the Notepad document with the file extension .bat (e.g. combine.bat) in the same directory as the CSV files.
• Close the .bat file, and navigate to the directory where it was saved. Double click on the .bat file (i.e. merge.bat) and an MS-DOS window will appear, once the process is complete the MS-DOS screen will close automatically.
• If you navigate to the location where all of the CSV files were originally downloaded and where the .bat file was created, you will notice that there is a new CSV file with the user defined name inserted in the .bat file.

Note:The CSV file that is created comes to approximately 150Mb, and 1.7 million records. If this is opened in Microsoft Excel only the first 65,536 records can be seen as the software cannot display more than this number of records.