shiningthrough
Gazetteer Of Great Britain Download with recognizable Counties and Latitude & Longitude
The problem when developing a Gazetteer of Great Britain, is which of the counties should we be using?
Perhaps the ones that are most familiar to residents in the UK would be postal counties, but these are no longer used by Royal Mail, and have been discontinued and are no longer maintained. They are currently provided as part of the "alias" file, to be used with the PAF database, but from 2013 they will not appear in any Royal Mail database.
Perhaps then we should use the Metropolitan & Non-Metropolitan Counties and Unitary Authorities that are used for governance in Great Britain, and are actively maintained? The problem with these is that Unitary Authorities can be very small, for example, you would not expect the city of "Wakefield" to be in the county of "Wakefield"
Maybe we should use Ceremonial Counties, the boundaries of which are based on Metropolitan & Non-Metropolitan Counties and Unitary Authorities, and whose names are often the same as postal and historic counties?
The Gazetteer below has been compiled from current open government data from Ordnance Survey, and combined with current data from The Office For National Statistics. It has further been processed so that it contains only Cities, Towns and Hamlets (no landmarks or geographical features), and all positions are given in WGS84 Latitudes, and longitudes (compatible with google mapping).
- For England, the settlements are shown against Ceremonial Counties.
- For Scotland, the settlements are shown against Lieutenancy Counties.
- For Wales, the settlements are shown against a combination of Administrative Counties and Ceremonial Counties.
Here is a selection of records from the Data Set.
The price of this current(1st April 2010) data set is £50, this reflects the work and research that has gone into compiling it, and is a fraction of what Royal Mail charge.
Before you download this data set, please note that is for Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) only, and not for the UK(United Kingdom). This is beacause the Ordnance Survey source data is only provided for Great Britain.
After you have completed your purchase, your download will begin automatically.
If you have any questions, you can contact us here:
supp...@shiningthrough.co.uk