Postcode data from npemap.org.uk no longer recommended

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 13:50:57 +0000

Back in 2006 when we started this project, a lot of the interest came from being able to crowd-source postcodes at a time when there was no free source of postcodes. The site was a great demonstration of crowd sourcing, where people were able to contribute a small amount of data at the same time as enjoying the lovely old maps the team were able to collect. As our early blog posts excitedly report, we gathered around ten times more postcodes (albeit at lower quality) in one month than FreeThePostcode.org had in the previous year.
However in mid-2010 the Ordnance Survey released their Code-Point Open, an accurate and complete dataset mapping postcodes to location available under a permissive licence and regularly updated. This means that the outputs of NPEMap.org.uk (and for that matter FreeThePostcode.org) are now essentially redundant. The main difference, other than the far superior data quality, is that the Code-Point Open licence requires you to acknowledge your use of Ordnance Survey data.
As a result, we are no longer planning to provide updated data exports or develop the postcode collection part of the site. New submissions from users will no longer be accepted. We will leave the data exports available for the time being but recommend that consumers switch over to other data sources, such as Code-Point Open, as soon as practical.
The presentation of the old OS maps remains an interesting part of the site and we plan to keep this part of the site alive, although there are no current plans to extend the collection.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed postcodes, postcode corrections, and all the many helpful suggestions we've received over the years!