I don't expect anyone to be able to answer this, but hope to be proved wrong. Does anyone know if there is a reasonably comprehensive source of old postcode data? I have data going back a few years and a fair proportion are codes that appear to have been been retired by Royal Mail. Has anyone has found decent source of such codes?
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1It would be easier if you add the year you want to find postcodes before or after of it. You said you have data going back a few years. But how many years before? :) – Tasos Nov 25 '13 at 22:47
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2Well my data goes back nearly 10 years, but it would certainly be useful to know how people have tackled this more generally :) – geotheory Nov 26 '13 at 0:06
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It would be really useful to me to know a ballpark figure of how many obsolete postcodes there are to help me know how to tackle a problem I have. 10k? 100k? Going back 10 years would be enough! – Kit Johnson May 11 at 9:19
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Found the answer to my own question: about 800,000. – Kit Johnson May 11 at 11:13
This site UK Data Service has historical postcodes from 1988. But I don't know if it is open data since I have to login. I hope this will help you :)
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1Thanks Anastasios. Surprised I didn't spot that. I have access to UKDS but the links still fail, but I'm pretty sure thats the right data so I'll work through it with UKDS. – geotheory Nov 26 '13 at 10:24
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Postcode data is now available on the ONS website.
From that page you can download a CSV file which when uncompressed is over one gigabyte in size. One of the fields is DOTERM, which gives you the date of termination. It therefore should be a comprehensive source of data on retired postcodes.
