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UK Postal Counties List

UK Postal Counties List

Posted by Ian Harris on March 21, 2009

On a recent project, we were required to create a drop down list to display the UK’s counties as part of a web form collecting users addresses. We assumed that this would be a pretty standard task and that there would be an abundance of pre-configured lists available on the Internet for download. After about an hour of research, it became clear that it was not going to be that simple. All of the lists we unearthed were either incomplete or out of date and it seems that we were not the first developers to run into this trouble.

You can see how it is easy to get it wrong though, take a look at the Wikipedia list of UK counties. The list of counties has changed quite considerably over time, especially in Wales.


As we were only interested in postal addresses for the web form, we decided it would be quicker and easier to compile our own list using the postal county data in this Wikipedia article. So here is a zipped file containing the HTML list as well as a XML list we created of the current UK postal counties. We hope this helps you out in some way. It may be worth just keeping these lists on file somewhere, you never know when you may need them.

UKCounties.zip 1.55kb

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14 Responses to “UK Postal Counties List”

Comments

  1. Stuart Says:

    March 25th, 2009 at 10:10 am

    hi there Ian

    Interesting article, we had a similar situation at work with a list of countries, which admittedly can change more often than counties.

    Very kind of you to upload the list, and I look forward to further tutorials from you!

    all the best
    Stuart

    Reply
  2. oriol Says:

    May 18th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Hi,

    what about uk *postal codes* for that counties? ;)

    Reply
  3. MikeR Says:

    October 23rd, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    Hello Ian, thanks for the list and for sharing. Very useful.

    Mike

    Reply
  4. Mike Says:

    November 29th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    Avon no longer exists!!!

    Reply
  5. Sean Says:

    January 9th, 2010 at 10:41 am

    I’m not sure the listing for Wales are correct..
    Pembrokeshire?

    Reply
    • Ian Harris Says:

      January 10th, 2010 at 7:56 pm

      Hi Sean,

      I have listed the postal counties, not the actual geographical counties as it is probably more useful when creating address forms. Take a look at the Wikipedia article.

      Thanks,

      Ian

      Reply
  6. Anver Says:

    January 30th, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    Many thanks for the list

    Reply
  7. Kevin Vickers Says:

    September 12th, 2011 at 9:01 am

    Great List.
    Saved me hours of research.
    I’ve Cut/Pasted and formatted it into Excel 2003 / 2007 if anyone wants it?

    Reply
  8. Iain Says:

    December 19th, 2011 at 8:31 pm

    Kevin,

    Many thanks for publishing this, much appreciated.

    I will add you to the links page of the site I’ve created.

    Reply
  9. Barefoot Mahala Says:

    January 12th, 2012 at 10:46 pm

    thanks – just saved me a lot of work!

    Reply

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