Post town
The Post Town is a required part of all UK postal addresses and is a central unit of the postal delivery system in addition to the alphanumeric post code . Specifying the correct post town in the address increases the delivery speed of letters and parcels, as the post town system usually corresponds with the postal distribution offices. The main function of the post town , however, is to distinguish between the city and street of addresses without a postcode.
There are around 1500 post towns in the Royal Mail system . Each post town belongs to one, sometimes several higher-level post districts and can also include numerous towns and villages. The boundaries of the post towns rarely correspond to the administrative boundaries , but the system often brings together places that otherwise have little in common.
The interaction between post town and postcode is also not clear. Normally a postcode sector belongs to exactly one post town , but there are also examples in which this is not the case: postcodes of the sector EH14 5 exist in the post towns Juniper Green, Currie and Balerno (with Balerno also postcodes in the sector EH14 has 7 ).
Footnotes
- ^ Royal Mail, Address Management Guide, (2004)