please empty your brain below

:)
Brilliant. E20, which you mention has become Olympic Park, was of course used prior to 2011 as the on-screen postcode of Walford in Eastenders. Though that doesn't seem to have followed the alphabetical order rule.

Rather cryptically, I can't see any E19 in your list...?
Hello from pedantry corner!

You've moved Dartford right into London there, but I'm sure you meant SE8 to be Deptford. Apropos of nothing, I vaguely recall plans to introduce N1A for the new developments at Kings Cross.
Which, now I read it again, you did actually mention. *skulks off*
Chingford (Essex) 10 miles from Central London, and yet has an Inner postcode (E4). Richmond (Surrey) 8 miles from Central London has an outer London postcode (TW). I have always thought the code system to be odd.
Um, I can't see W1.
SW12 currently appears twice in text at bottom.
SE8 amended, thanks.
W1 squeezed in.
Extra SW12 removed.
And I've mentioned the lack of E19.
I won't start on the whole 'postcode snobbery' system within the London postcode area but isn't it annoying that the postcode system doesn't match the local government system, such that I've heard someone who lives in Erith insist he lives in Kent and not in London based on the fact he has a DA postcode. I'm also often having to tell people that there is now no longer a need to put the county or the London district into one's address - street name, London (or other Post Town) and postcode is all that Royal Mail ask for.
P.S. Coincidentally, London Reconnections blog have an extensive discussion going on Post Towns, counties in London etc. - see "What’s it all about, Thameslink?" comments from 0932 22nd Feb onwards.
Postcode snobbery? If you live in a London Borough you live in London. That includes all the compass point postcodes plus RM, KT, TW etc etc.

John - Chingford is not in Essex it is in the LONDON Borough of Waltham Forest and Richmond is not in Surrey it is in the LONDON Borough of Richmond.
One important aspect you don't discuss is how the name for each postal district was chosen. People now tend to assume that it was named after the area that was covered and, in practice, this has become a self-fulfilling assumption. But, as you suggest, each one was originally named after the location of the sorting office.

This is a major issue in Brixton, which is divided into two postal districts, leading to constant debates about which is the "real" Brixton, i.e. is it SW2, actually named Brixton or is it SW9, named Stockwell. But more of the actual centre of Brixton is in SW9 than SW2, whereas SW2 covers areas like bits of West Norwood that are not in anyone's idea of Brixton. The reason for this, as suggested above, is that it was the SW2 sorting office that was in Brixton, whereas the SW9 sorting office was in Stockwell - or at least it was in what people thought of as Stockwell when the districts were originally named. Since then the gravitational pull of Stockwell Underground station has led people to change their assumptions about where Stockwell covers.
My own Postcode is WC1H 0JR - I always wondered where the 'H' fits in; I am still wondering.

P.S. In fact, the new postcode for King's Cross is N1C.
One very dull fact I've found having had to work on software to validate postcodes in the past there are also a few quirks with London postcodes. The format of a postcode is generally one or two letters, followed by 1 or 2 digits, space, digit, 2 letters.

However some of the London postcodes adopt the format 2 letters, 1 digit, 1 letter, space, digit, 2 letters. E.G. EC1A 1AA. No other area has postcodes in the format where the last character of the bit before the space is a letter.

Also as I'm sure you know London does have other postcodes for the more outer parts. E.G. the KT postcode for Kingston-upon-Thames, RM for Romford etc.
Actually all Royal Mail need is house NUMBER and postcode. There are 52 houses in my road, and we have a different postcode to the houses on the other side of the road, so my postcode is unique to 26 houses.
Some people in Bromley get very agitated when news organisations refer to the town as south London rather than Kent despite Bromley being the largest London borough. Likewise Croydon/Surrey. I heard residents in Bromley many years ago resisted proposals to extend the SE postcode from Penge and (parts of) Crystal Palace outwards. Not sure if this is true or urban legend. Certainly in the 80s our school textbooks were still supplied by Kent County Council despite Bromley becoming part of the wider Greater London many years before.

Further afield villages around Saffron Walden in Essex have CB postcodes meaning Cambridgeshire.
I see the Museum of London is only interested in areas that fall within the compass point postcodes. That makes us outsiders feel really special. ;)
Very interesting post, as always. However one small correction - E18 is South Woodford. Woodford itself is IG8.
Ha ha, I see I've lived in NE twice in my life; once on the Tyne and once on the Lea.
SW19 (Wimbledon) should come after SW20 (West Wimbledon) if they are laid out in alphabetical order. I wonder why it's the other way around!
@allotmentqueen
Actually RM needs the house NAME or number and the postcode :P

That aside, I recently sold something on ebay to someone who didn't have a valid address according to the RM database. It was on an industrial estate. Google Street View showed a sign near to the postbox of his claimed postcode, which directed the postman back onto the road and up some stairs into a makeshift hut... my package got there OK.

If you vote for Mayor, you're in London. But you can also be in Surrey/Essex/Kent depending on the ceremonial counties.
E1W - Wapping is missing from the schematic, though it might be alluded to in bullet 11.

Also in Wapping is E98, for News International, and E77, for NatWest, both non-geographic postcodes.

As an aside, I've often thought that SE1 should now be split into SC1, for the part located opposite the City of London, which would be apt historically, given that Southwark was part of the former for most of its existence.
I always believed E16 was 'Tidal Basin', particularly as the 3 docks the postcode encompasses are collectively known as the Royal Docks rather than the Victoria Docks.
I work in Central London as a cycle courier and get to deal with subdivided postcodes all day. I've never seen an authoritative reference regarding how the suffixes are lettered, but while some have a logic to them, others I've memorised from experience or using my own memory prompt.

E1W: Wapping
N1C: King's [C]ross
WC1X: King's X (& Grays Inn Road)
W1T: FiTzrovia
SW1V: Victoria
EC1R: ClerRkenwell
W1G: WiGmore Street (eastern end, Harley, Welbeck, Wimpole)
W1H: Marble ArcH

Beyond that, you just have to memorise them as they are e.g. EC1V for south of the City Road into Clerkenwell, SW1X for Knightsbridge and Belgravia, etc. There are dozens, the list goes on..
If you vote for Mayor of London (or pay council tax to one of the London Boroughs), you live in London. Ceremonial counties don't mean anything anymore. It doesn't matter that Welling used to be in Kent (for example) - it isn't anymore. No one who lives in Walthamstow (where I live) goes on about living in Essex, yet Walthamstow was Essex until 1965 - same as Chingford - though people in Chingford seem to think they still live in Essex because they have a different post code.

Same with West Ham and countless other areas that became London in 1965 but were assigned 'compass point' post codes. No one talks about 'ceremonial counties' in those cases. They only seem to care when they have a DA or UB post code.
I'd always wondered about UK postcodes. Now it has been so clearly explained it still totally fails to make any sense whatsoever.
Anyone who watches Call the Midwife the other week would have heard reference to new flats in Newham. Of course at the time the show is set Newham didn't exist. As Polkotrini says East Ham and West Ham (which became Newham) were still parts of Essex and Middlesex then.

In the 80s when Bromley introduced its paint stroke logo it was always accompanied by the subtitle The London Borough as if to emphasise its position. Similarly Newham is now branded Newham London.
East Ham and West Ham were both Essex, weren't they?

There's an odd quirk in south east London where a small slab of SE13 (Lewisham) is in the borough of Greenwich, and across Lewisham Road, a smaller section of SE10 (Greenwich) is in the borough of Lewisham.
You're right East and West Ham were both in Essex. They were county boroughs outside of Essex CC control until they became Newham. My mistake. Call The Midwife still got it wrong though ;)

The recent report of a fox attacking a baby saw the news media explain the attack took place in Downham, Bromley but in a part controlled by the London borough of Lewisham.
The news that the OLPC were trying to get the production of EastEnders to move to the IBC and the fact that the park ended up with an E20 postcode are, I'm told, not unrelated.
The compass point postcodes almost, but not quite, match the old London County Council boundaries. As an example where they don't match, my dad went to school in what was then part of Mitcham, Surrey, but has a Tooting (SW17) postcode. The postcode boundary is the railway line, but the county boundary was the River Graveney, one block further north.

Postal counties are still used to distinguish places like Bromley, St Margarets, Kingston and Richmond from their namesakes elsewhere in the country. It soyld also be remembered that Surrey County Council's offices are still in Kingston upon Thames - you can take Kingston out of Surrey, but they haven't yet got Surrey out of Kingston!
Sorry to disagree with OwenMse at 11:23am, but IG8 is Woodford Green. E18 was/is Woodford as can be deduced alphabetically. Here it is the naming of stations which has caused confusion. Woodford station should really be Woodford Green, whereas South Woodford was originally called George Lane (Woodford). St Mary's Church was the original church of Woodford parish (and may be considered the original heart of the settlement), yet this area is now named South Woodford.
'London' means one thing in local government terms and another in postal terms. This has been the case for so long as such divisions have existed at all. The London postal district existed before the (now obsolete) county of London, and was considerably larger than it (though it is smaller that Greater London). Would it have been wrong to refer to Walthamstow as being in London as 1960, despite its having a London postal address, because it came under Essex County Council? I don't think so. Places can be in London for one purpose but not for another.

The London local government region is called Greater London. That implies the existence of a Smaller London. I suppose you could argue that Smaller London is just the City, but that does not seem plausible to me. I think there is a perfectly reasonable sense in which, say, Brixton is is London and, say, Richmond is not, which does not prevent Richmond being in London in another way.
My point earlier about "postcode snobbery" aluded to some postcodes being seen as better than others. For example I lived in Wood Green but right on the edge of N8 (Hornsey). My neighbours in the next street were in N22 (Wood Green), allegedly less desirable. I think things like insurance and house prices may follow similar lines.

By the way the fact that there are anomalies such as part of Lewisham postcode being in Greenwich Borough etc. are not really anomalies at all as Postcode Areas and local authority administrative boundaries are not contiguous and meet different needs. Certainly outside London I suspect Royal Mail define postcode areas and sectors largely on distribution efficiencies. That may be different of course for London and big cities where there is a historical precedent, as described in the original post.

Try matching local authority administrative boundaries to telephone code areas, vehicle registration districts and parliamentary constituencies and you'll have a similar problem.

All this probably comes from the UK being one of the first to develop all the administrative systems which have grown up at different times, with more 'modern' nations I suspect having much more contiguity (is that a word?) in their various boundaries.
But how the Post Office classifies us really has nothing to do with where we live. Case in point (using the criteria set out in the example above):

You still hear people refer to Chingford E4 as Essex. I doubt they considered it "London" when it actually WAS Essex just because it had a London postcode (and then changed their tune when it became London in a sudden attack of mass contrarianism).

I also disagree that "Greater London" implies or necessitates the existence of a "Lesser London". But that's irrelevant. Greater London is a region and if you live in the City of London or one of the 32 Boroughs, you live in Greater London - not Essex, Surrey or Kent. Or Middlesex, for that matter. It's really rather simple.
I don't think there are any NE signs in the post 1917 E2 district. I once saw a period TV drama with the huge solecism showing someone writing an address on a Queen Victoria envelope with the address W1 rather than W. Did you spot this, DG?
http://postalheritage.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/a-visit-down-to-mail-rail/
It connnected quite a few of the district offices.
I gather Michael Portillo had a ride there.
"Try matching local authority administrative boundaries to ............ vehicle registration districts"

Strictly speaking there has been no such thing as a vehicle registration district since 1974, when Swansea took over from the local councils - you can register a vehicle in whichever Vehicle Licencing Office you please. Each VLO is allocated a block of codes which are supposed to have some significance to the area they are in (e.g all B* codes are allocxated to Birmingham, the A* codes are allocated to the three offices in East Anglia and so on). But if you live in London, for example, you don't have to register the vehicle in Wimbledon or Sidcup or Borehamwood (which all issue L* codes - Borehamwood has a mixture of L* and K* as it has taken over Luton's K* codes) - if you want to can register it with Chelmsford (E*) or Reading (R*) or even one of the Scottish LVOs (S*)
An earlier commenter may be right that the Post Office officially only needs the postal town and not the county but it has taken the internet a while to catch on as almost every time you have to enter an address you are required to enter the county, usually as a mandatory field. I don't understand why more sites don't use the technology that allows you to just enter the house name or number and postcode.
I thought someone may pick me up on vehicle registration districts - I stand corrected! Thanks
Look, most of these so-called anomalies are nothing of the sort, once you understand the point I made above.

To repeat myself; the name of each area is not the area covered, it's the location of the sorting office.
A good example of Bryn's point is Ricmond-upon-Thames, whose postcode is TW9, for Twickenham. Twickenham is across the river and historically in another county, but is part of the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, and indeed is the home of its council headquarters.

If you go by postcodes you get some very odd idea of geography - Skegness has a Nottingham postcode, despite being in Lincolnshire. John o Groats has a Kirkwall (Orkney) postcode. Parts of Shropshire have Welsh postcodes.
@Whiff - it's probably best that they don't, as the Royal Mail database behind it is - astonishingly - deeply inaccurate.

Sites that rely on it (and have lazy developers who don't let you override it with your own details) quite regularly prevent me from entering my perfectly valid address. And lose a customer.

Anyway, any thoughts on the alphabetical anomaly that is SE19/Norwood?
Quote: "Ten postcode areas have been further subdivided by adding another letter on the end. These are E1, N1, W1, EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, WC1, WC2 and SW1."
I remember a number of the banks in the City having extended EC3 postcodes, such as the NatWest at Eastcheap being EC3M 1AH, and wondering if there was any meaning in the extra letter.
Now, at last, you've explained it: thanks, DG
Another quote (from the comments above): "As an aside, I've often thought that SE1 should now be split into SC1, for the part located opposite the City of London, which would be apt historically, given that Southwark was part of the former for most of its existence."
I can understand the reasoning, but surely there would be massive problems with the phonetics?
Amazing. I was sitting here in S10 last week pondering on this very issue.
Another unusual case is Long Eaton, which is a satellite town of Nottingham, but is actually across the border in Derbyshire, in the local authority district of Erewash. It has Nottingham as its posttown and an NG postcode. So you could address letters to Long Eaton, Nottingham, Derbyshire, NG...
When the system was originally set up both W1 (Western) and W2 (Paddington) were 'Head Districts', so W1 should be listed as 'Western Head District' (although it had no 'sub-districts' under it).

Also I believe that the name of NW6 office was 'Maida Hill'

Glasgow also used to have geographical/numeric districts, like London, in pre postcode days - including S1 and C1 (et seq).

And there are a number of places along the Anglo-Scottish border whose postal address puts them the wrong side of it.
Here is a photo of another street sign with the long defunct N.E. postal district.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibisbill/8627704171/in/photostream
I still refer back to this post often when friends and I are discussing postcodes. (We are an exciting bunch.)
There are plenty of NE street signs throughout Hackney. I'm photographing all those that I'm aware of and can let anybody who's interested have copies.
As far as Royal Mail are concerned, not postcode areas but postcode districts. which in London, confusingly, began life as sub-districts before the eight London postal districts* were reborn as postcode areas when full postcodes were introduced, and one- and two-letter mnemonics were extended across the UK (AB to ZE) and the crown dependencies (IM, GY, JE).

*N, E, EC, SE, SW, W, WC (and also NE and S before Anthony Trollope[citation needed] put them into abeyance before their revival as postcode areas for Newcastle upon Tyne and Sheffield).

They abolished the NE postal district without even an announcement!

From The Times of Saturday, May 15, 1869:

The usual weekly meeting of the Metropolitan Board of Works was held yesterday at the offices offices of the Board, Spring-gardens; Sir John Thwaites in the chair.
[…]
Mr. John Pollard, Clerk, read the following letter from the General Post-office:—
“12th May, 1869.
“Sir,—With reference to a personal application at the office of the Metropolitan Board of Works recently made by the Post-office surveyor for the London districts, I am directed by the Postmaster-General to state, for the information of the Board, that the ‘North-Eastern’ postal district of London has been for some time abolished, so far as the internal arrangements of the service are concerned, and that the ground has been incorporated with the ‘Eastern district.’
“It has not been thought necessary to issue any general notice to the public in the matter, but it is considered desirable that the use of the initials ‘N.E.’ should be discontinued as convenient opportunities occur; and I am to request that the Metroplitan Board of Works, if they see no objection, will be good enough to assist this department, by causing the initial letter ‘E.’ to be substituted for ‘N.E.’ (in all cases in which the change applies) in the list of street names, &c.
“I am, &c.,
F. Hill.
The London postal sub-districts were numbered alphabetically by delivery office name when they were first announced on 1 March 1917, apart from the central districts which were generally numbered 1, except that there was a second alphabetical sequence in each of the south London districts: SW11 to SW19 for the sub-districts under Head District Office Battersea and SE19 to SE27 for the sub-districts under Norwood (a Head District Office until 1926).

But it wasn’t until 1920 that Golders Green and West Wimbledon were given their own sub-districts, which therefore had to be appended out of alphabetical sequence: NW11 and SW20 respectively. (London Postal History Group, London’s Postal History – Section J, p10)

NW11 officially came into operation on 13 December 1920. “Apparently the development of Golders Green has been so rapid, or the Postmaster-General has been so long in discovering it, that only six days’ notice of the change of address could be given.” (The Times, 10 December 1920, p7)

And, as mentioned, SE28 was created for the Thamesmead development (it has been in use since 1971); and E20 was created for Stratford’s post-2012 Olympic Park, mischievously skipping E19.

Cross-ref: main post, postcode quiz / comments
Thanks Rich (as a previously puzzled NW11 resident!)
The fascinating 1857 postal district dartboard is found archived here [dead link]
Thanks Felix, bullseye! Here’s a higher resolution version of that image and (via here) higher still. By “Day & Son, Lith[ographe]rs to the Queen”. Oddly, some of the outermost sorting offices are left unlabelled.










TridentScan | Privacy Policy