28 July: Post Codes

On this date in 1959 Ernest Marples, then Postmaster General, announced that Norwich had been selected as the first place in Britain to receive a postcode as we know it today. Norwich was selected as it already had eight automatic mail sorting machines in use. Here are 10 things you might not know about postcodes.

1. The UK has 1.8 million postcodes which cover 29 million addresses.
2. UK postcodes are written in the format AA0 0AA. The first two letters relate to the nearest large town or city, eg. BS = Bristol. There are 124 of these. The first number refers to a district in that area. There are 3,000 of these. This part of the postcode is known as the outward code. The second part of the postcode is called the inward code and is used by the sorting office in the receiving area. The number here represents the sector and the letters the individual unit.
3. In 2003 people in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead decided they wanted their postcode changed from SL because it linked them with Slough. They were unsuccessful.
4. An individual unit usually contains about 17 addresses, although HD7 5UZ in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, covers seven streets, more than any other in the UK.
5. Postcodes were first introduced in London in 1857. The city was divided into 10 postal districts based on compass points: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, EC for East Central and WC for West Central. In the modern system London no longer uses all these codes. NE stands for Newcastle and S for areas of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire around Sheffield. The first city other than London to use a postcode system was Liverpool, from 1864.
6. Following the trial in Norwich, in 1965, Tony Benn, who was Postmaster General at the time, decided that the system should cover the whole country. The creation and application of a postcode for every home in Britain took eight years, starting with Croydon, and ending with Norwich, which was re-coded to bring it into line with the rest of the system.
7. Why do we have letters and numbers rather than a fully numeric code like they have in the US? Two reasons. Using letters and numbers allows for a greater number of combinations; the current alpha-numeric system has enough potential combinations to create 48 million postcodes; and letters and numbers are easier to remember than just numbers.
8. Optical recognition machines read the postcodes and automatically convert them to phosphor dots which can be read by the sorting machines. Mail correctly addressed with a postcode can be sorted 20 times faster this way than by hand.
9. That said, about a fifth of non-business mail is sent without a postcode. There's no excuse as there is a website, the Royal Mail online postcode finder, which can tell you the postcode you need. It one of the most used web pages in the UK, with around 100,000 visits a day - more than 40 million hits per year.
10. Writing a letter to Santa? His postcode is either SAN TA1 or XM4 5HQ (HOH OHO in Canada). Other postcodes include Buckingham Palace, SW1A 1AA; Ten Downing Street SW1A 2AA; House of Commons, SW1A 0AA; House of Lords, SW1A 0PW (PW for Palace of Westminster); London's Olympic Stadium, E20 2ST; The World Snooker Championships at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, S14 7UP (147 up is the maximum lead a snooker player can have, from a maximum break); Wembley Stadium, HA9 0XX. Even the space ship Red Dwarf in the TV series has a postcode: RE1 3DW.

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