When doing some work for a London removals company, i compiled a list of London postcodes alongside the district they covered 9people would call saying something like "i'm in N16, how much to E3" without any reference to what areas these were)
It soon became apparent that there was an alphabetical relationship for each series, the Ns, NWs' Ws etc (there is no NE, and some other codes are missing, because the P o realised that insufficient households would be in these large sectors, so merged them, eg NE became part of the E series.
I cant remember all the details, but for example (in reverese order), SW19 was Wimbledon, SW18 was Wandsworth, SW17 was Tooting, SW16 was Streatham, ... N22 was Wood Green, N21 was Winchmore Hill, N20 was (I think) Tottenham. Anyway, apart from the N1, W1 and the EC, WC codes, it does work out.
The trouble with this was the system could then never be extended geographically as London grew outwards - whereas a system based on inner areas having lower numbers would have been more informative geographically as well, so some quite urbanised areas of the London conurbation have Uxbridge etc postcodes
Hillary Shaw, Geography, University of Southampton
|