What is a Post Town and How is it Used

A post town is a small town or village in the United Kingdom that serves as a central location for postal services. It's a crucial part of the country's postal system.

Post towns are designated by Royal Mail, the UK's postal service provider. They help to identify the location of a post office and the surrounding area it serves.

The first post town was established in 1857, when the General Post Office introduced a new system for sorting mail. This system used post towns as a way to organize mail more efficiently.

In the UK, every post town has a unique postcode, which helps to identify the specific area it serves.

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For our exploration of post towns, it's essential to understand where the data comes from.

The data for post towns is primarily sourced from the UK's Royal Mail.

The Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF) is a comprehensive database that contains information on all postcodes and addresses in the UK.

Locality information is often added to postal addresses to provide a more specific location. This is particularly useful when there are multiple streets with the same name within a post town or postcode district.

In many places, a village or suburb name is included above the post town to give a more precise location. This is especially important when the postcode is unknown or wrongly recorded.

A dependent locality is a disambiguating feature that helps to clarify the address. This can be particularly helpful when there are multiple addresses with the same name.

Some addresses require a double dependent locality line, which precedes the dependent locality line. Examples include Churwell, Morley, Leeds and Marton, Sinnington, York.

Locality information is not always part of the official postal address. For example, within the London post town, the postcode district name is not required whenever the postcode is used.

In the absence of a full valid postcode, locality can help to prevent ambiguity. This is especially true when there are multiple streets with the same name or when post towns in different counties have the same name.

Locality can also assist manual sorting if the sorting machine rejects the letter or no valid postcode is provided.

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OSM Data is a valuable resource for geospatial data. It's based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data from 2025-04-16 22:54:00 Z.

The data includes addr:city tags used to record Post Towns in each postcode area. In general, each postcode district has only one or sometimes two Post Towns for all the addresses within it.

OSM objects with addr:* tags without an addr:city tag are counted as 'missing'. This means there's a gap in the data that needs to be addressed.

Objects where the value of the addr:city tag occurs on under 20% of the addr:city tags in the postcode district are counted as 'warnings'. This indicates a potential issue with the data that needs to be reviewed.

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You can find translations for the post town definition in many languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and many others.

For example, the Chinese translation for post town is available in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

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If you're interested in learning more about post towns in languages other than English, you can select from a list of languages, including Arabic, French, Russian, and many more.

Here is a list of some of the languages available for translation:

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