London Postcodes

[Rex_Rattus]

In another thread I asked for the location of The Horse and Groom, Groom Place (just off Belgrave Square) to be changed from Pimlico to Belgravia. RogerB has made a similar point regarding The Banker in EC4. Conrad says that as just having a postcode as the location is a bit dry, PuG has "mapped" all postcodes to a location, and for some reason SW1 has shown up as Pimlico. Fellow Londoners will be well aware that SW1 covers a much larger area than just Pimlico, and I don't think that there is a place name that can accurately describe SW1 in its entirety. The same goes for numerous Central London postcodes/area. In the absence of a better system conrad is disinclined to make any changes at the moment.

So, is there a better system? My own view is that as PuG has recently acquired a number of members with an extensive knowledge of London, he could just let us notify corrections as and when we spot them and eventually the London locations will be in much better shape. Could be a lengthy process, but it is one way of getting there in the end. There will be gray areas where a pub sits between two area, but I don't think that matters too much, and will be a lot better than having a pub stated to be in an area miles from where it really is. Anyone got any ideas on this one?

[Conrad]

Just one of my I wonder if you can come up with a better idea threads.

Basically this stems from a couple of correction threads we have running asking for London corrections:
http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showt...=4943#post4943
http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showt...=6542#post6542

It is explained a bit in there, but by way of some background. A pub is on our database, and has a number of elements that make it up, these elements help cluster it, for addresses they have a street and a town. The town operates as a way of grouping the pubs on our system, so Bristol is a town.

Just to complicate things a little more the town can either be a postal town in which case it shows under a county so Birmingham is a Postal town in the West Midlands, but Coleshill is a town in the Postal town of Birmingham. So in terms of navigating our system you would go Pubs Galore > West Midlands > Birmingham > Coleshill. And both Birmingham and Coleshill contain pubs.

Anyway this brings us to London, which is for me and Dave is a big mystery, to try and get it to work we dumped the Postal Towns once you are into the London postcodes and instead made each postcode its own Postal Town and gave them a name to offer some guidance, the names were taken from Wikipedia.

It is obvious this is confusing some of our Londoners who actually know London , so I was wondering if there was a better system that would work for Londoners and non-Londoners alike. So if anyone has any bright ideas lets hear them.

Something that occurs to me is that we could make each postcode a Postal Town and then make the names towns in the Postal Towns, but that would mean you end up with SW1 being empty and just containing the districts of Pimlico, Belgravia, etc. Also I am guessing some of these districts broach more than 1 postcode so we are in danger of more than 1 district or misleading names.

What I think it needs:

• Should reference postcode (eg. SW1)
• Should be usable by people with or without knowledge of London
• Should not allow duplication of place names
• Pubs should only be listed once and can only have 1 town

It may be that there are just different bad solutions to this problem, and the maps certainly help but it is worth checking to see if anyone has any cooler ideas.

[hopwas]

Just to complicate things a little more the town can either be a postal town in which case it shows under a county so Birmingham is a Postal town in the West Midlands, but Coleshill is a town in the Postal town of Birmingham. So in terms of navigating our system you would go Pubs Galore > West Midlands > Birmingham > Coleshill. And both Birmingham and Coleshill contain pubs.

But Coleshill is in Warwickshire...

Sorry I'll shut up.

[NickDavies]

It's only really the central 'head' London postal districts - those that end in a '1' that cause a problem - the others are numbered alphabetically from the names of the areas they cover.

That could be got round by splitting them into 'villages' and to assist in that the head districts - those ending in a'1' are really a set of several postal districts in their own right - see the entry for SW1 here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW_postcode_area

You could have something like (very roughly named don't flame me)

SW1A: Whitehall
SW1E,H,P: Victoria
SW1V: Pimlico
SW1W,X: Belgavia
SW1Y: St James's

[Conrad]

That suggestion is a really easy change for us to make as it is basically what is already there, we can just dump the pubs by postcode into those districts if that is correct.

[HTM69]

SW1V: Pimlico

Grrr.. prepare for a flaming!

My work postal code is SW1V and I work in Victoria - not Pimlico!

Though, I guess you could argue that the location is right on the border. Pimlico is literally a stones throw away

[Rex_Rattus]

I reckon that Nick's suggestion is a definite runner. If we can sort out SW1 then that will be a mighty step forward. There will be pubs that will get mis-attributed (vis HTM69's posting above) but presumably any such can be corrected in the usual way? Nick has made a quick first stab at attributing areas to some of the SW1 "sub postcodes". Do you want suggestions for all of them? Happy to help, but don't want to tread on your toes!

[Conrad]

Hi Rex,

We just crossed over, I will merge my post into yours, it offered a load of background that hopefully will help anyone technically inclined.

Edit: And of course it merged above this post to be nice and confusing

[oldboots]

I'm not a Londoner but that's not going to stop me putting in my tuppence worth.


It looks to me like the difficulty is caused by the arbitrary link between Post Code and the list of Post Town names. When someone adds a London post code on the "Add Pub" page the Post Town is automatically inserted from a list I guess Conrad or Dave has generated and London is put in the County field. This list of PC/PT is of dubious accuracy to those who know the "villages of London" .

Would it be simpler, or even possible, to unlink Post Code and Post Town and have London as the Post Town, leave the County field blank, and let who ever is adding the pub make their own arbitrary choice of area by putting for example Pimlico or Victoria in the village field?

I had a quick look in an A-Z and counted over 300 different area names in London that I guess would be used by locals, some within a single post code others straddling two or three, so making a list to link all area names in common usage to post codes isn't practical.

[Conrad]

I had begun to wonder something similar myself. I have a few problems with that suggestion though.

I think people in London frequently do use postcode rather than area names, so it is quite useful to have it highly visible at that level if at all possible.

Allowing people to willy nilly add place names I suspect will actually just end up with us having a London page with 300+ different towns in it and become even less usable than it already is (I think)?

People would start migrating the pubs from Greater London to Central London as a more desirable location if we unlinked the postcodes.

I think if we did that it would make it more usable to those who know London, but less usable to those who don't. And I think that is the wrong priority as those who know London are more likely to work out any wrinkles.

All of the above are purely my opinion, so if you think they are wrong do chime in so that I know.

Technical bit (not important): When you add a pub we guess the location based on a partial postcode, something I cobbled together before we got some of our newer tricks. So it back slices the postcode to guess a location, if it finds a pub with the same postcode it chucks itself in that location, if not tries the postcode minus the last character, and so on back until it matches. When I rewrite that bit we will probably still use that trick still but I may also check exactly what county it is in as I can establish that using geo-positioning now.