Re: FN-FORUM: Postcode Radius Search

date posted 31st March 2008 15:47

> 1)
> Just leading in postcode but general UK district coverage I think
> AB10,391978,804275
> AB11,394481,805116
> AB12,389980,799273
> Ca. 3000 records (similar to your link)

Those will be fairly accurate, especially in towns, but less so in rural
Scotland where the outbound areas are much larger.

The coordinates seem to be OS Grid References, which are in metres. This
makes the maths to calculate distances very easy (for distances less than
a few hundred miles).

You might want to think a little about the legality of this data:
technically it belongs to the Post Office and the Ordnance Survey...

OTOH you can use free things like the Google Maps API to retrieve
locations for outbound postcodes anyway, on an individual point basis.
Re-creating the entire database is not permitted.

> 2)
> Full postcodes, but not entire database
> 57.000000,0.000000,AB10 7LE
> 57.145931,-2.165580,AB15 6YJ
> 57.153180,-2.221180,AB15 8UN
> 57.204940,-2.211980,AB21 0GU
> Ca. 3000 records

Could be more useful, depending on where your locations of interest are.

You might also be able to use the 2001 Census postcode and location
information, if this is for internal business use only. But that's a big
beast to tackle, and quite out-of-date postcode-wise now.

Cheers!

Anthony
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