Address Guidelines for Great Britain

The Enterprise Geocoding Module offers GBR databases including CodePoint and AddressBase Premium. The AddressBase Premium database is a point-level database. Contact your sales representative for more information about licensing these databases. Your Enterprise Geocoding Module database release notes identify the current database vintages.

Follow these suggestions to ensure that your street input data is in the best format possible for optimum geocoding. For additional information about British addresses, see the Royal Mail website: http://www.royalmail.com/.

  • Street addresses—If you provide a street address, and either a town and state, or a postcode, you can perform an address geocode. The geocoder will match your full address record against its comprehensive geocoding database. Minor misspellings in street addresses are corrected in the returned candidates.

  • Postal box addresses—Geocode Address Global for Great Britain can geocode to addresses containing a PO Box. Some spelling variations of PO Box are supported. A successful match returns a result code of B2 along with the output format that is standardized according to British address formats. The priority of PO Box matching over streets is set in a Preference in Management Console.

  • Locality—UK addresses may contain two localities – dependent locality and double dependent locality, both of which you can enter in the Locality input field:
    • Dependent Locality—Distinguishes an address when there are identically named thoroughfares within the same postal town. For example, Winford, Bristol.
    • Double Dependent Locality—Distinguishes addresses between similar or identically named thoroughfares within the same locality. This can typically be a business park, estate park or airport. For example, Brunel Way, Cranford Estate, Millbrook, Southampton.

    A locality alias is not part of the postal address but can be used to help find addresses were the town or postcode is unknown. For example, Rycote Lane, Rycote.

  • Postal code—If you enter the postcode in the LastLine input field, you may use either the full postcode or just the post district as long as other street information or post information is present. If you enter the postcode in the PostalCode input field, you must use the complete postcode. Providing both the town and postcode can produce better results. The geocoder corrects postcode information and adds postcodes if your input does not already include them.
  • Northern Ireland addresses—The AddressPoint, CodePoint, AddressBase Plus, and AddressBase Premium databases include the same Northern Ireland data, accurate to the postcode centroid level. The AddressPoint, AddressBase Plus, and AddressBase Premium databases are supplemented with Northern Ireland postcode data from the Royal Mail source. This Northern Ireland data has postcode centroid (result code S3) precision only. That is the highest level of geocoding accuracy available for Northern Ireland addresses, even with the AddressPoint, AddressBase Plus, and AddressBase Premium point database sources.