Official postal addresses may soon no longer have county names on them. So is our link to counties steadily being eroded? And does it matter?
Royal Mail has announced that county names are to be deleted from its postal database, which is called the Postcode Address File and lists every address in the UK. It's used by businesses and public bodies.
People will still be able to put counties on addresses when they post letters, but are being advised it's not necessary because a house number, street and postcode are all that is needed.
Ian Beesley, chairman of the board that advises the Royal Mail on running the database, said county names had become "a kind of vanity attachment".
While many city dwellers may view the Royal Mail proposal as a sensible move - and one or two lines less to write on an envelope - for others this strikes at the heart of who they are. County-lovers say that by deleting county names from addresses, the postal service is tampering with Britain's history.
Source
"Vanity attachment" or not, does a reference to a County matter from a Swinging Heaven perspective ?
Should Swinging Heaven Admin change the "Location Settings" screen (refer :: Settingsunder My Account) and remove "Show my: County" option, just leaving "Show my:Town" and "Show my: Postcode" options ?
A mix of old and new here
- Old, if I have to address anything to relations and friends I'll still use East, North and West Riding of Yorkshire as decade old act of defiance
- New, none of the Sat Nav systems I've used in recent years will accept County name, instead relying on either a street & Town Name combination, or Postcode
Personally ambivalent, but thought worth flagging up for discussion
I never send letters so makes no odds to me.
I get also get annoyed that things come to me in South Humberside... I am in North Lincolnshire!!
as for the postcode thing... It depends how identifiable you want to be if in a rural area... In the last 2 houses before I moved to North Lincs, In Scotland the houses had unique postcodes due to location!!
Makes no odds to me as long as the post arrives and the service is value for money.
I responded "no".
I do so with experience of (dare I say it) the French system of postcodes simply based on a system devised by Napoleon.
Each Department (in English terms, a County, Town or City) has a number. The Departments are in numbered in alphabetical order. That is then added to with a further 3 digits which denotes the commune within that Department. There is no need for the name of the Department to be included in the address on an envelope because that is already stated by the Department number.
As you might expect, there are special arrangements for Paris (75) which has 20 arrondissements (administrative departments) arranged in a clockwise spiral around the Centre following the same basic principal with the arr. number following the Paris code (ie 75001) with similar arrangements for other large centres of population.
The upshot of this is that in a Country with over twice the land mass of Great Britain, all that is needed to find us in rural France is 3 lines of address; (1) our name, (2) our Hamlet, (3) our 5 digit postcode (first two numbers are the Department and the last three the Commune).
Our previous address in UK required 6 lines, the last including the postcode along with the County.
The French are immensely proud of their Departments displaying the Department number as part of the car immatriculation system (old arrangement) and voluntarily under the new Europe wide one. The pride associated with the County system in the UK is no different in that respect, but it is totally unnecessary in my view to waste time and effort on an envelope which is destined for the recycling bin after it has done its job.
The shorter the address the better as far as I can see
In the UK.
"The first one or two letters is the postcode area and it identifies the main Royal Mail sorting office which will process the mail. The second part is usually just one or two numbers but for some parts of London it can be a number and a letter. This is the postcode district and tells the sorting office which delivery office the mail should go to. This third part is the sector and is usually just one number. This tells the delivery office which local area or neighbourhood the mail should go to. The final part of the postcode is the unit code which is always two letters. This identifies a group
of up to 80 addresses and tells the delivery office which postal route (or walk) will deliver the item."
They have been around a long time post codes and the house number or name street and postcode have always been sufficient to ensure a letter is delivered.
Something I just read...
In 1463 Paris was the first city in the world to adopt house numbers. It took London a little longer, exactly 300 years to be precise!
My gransher told the story of a turning up in the village he lievd in addressed to 'common welsh surname' 'village name'.
The head postmaster asked how they'd deliver it; the postman looked at the originating office, king st in central London, and happily predicted it would be for Dai Communist, since King St was where CP Head Office was.
And it was....
(OMG where did that memory come from?)
