UK postal code database

[jason986]

I'm developing an application in my spare time and I need it to link to a uk post code file.

Is there anywhere I can get a list of uk postal codes and the corresponding addresses on file to download into my own database? Preferably free or very cheap.

I've found links to the PAF (Royal Mail) lists on the web but the charges are quite high and I was wondering if there are alternatives.

Jason

[Incubus]

Jason,

www.jibble.org/ukpostcodes/

This is just postcodes, and it doesn't guarantee that it is 100% correct - although it does seem to have a good spread of UK postcodes.

Hope this helps...

Cheers,

Kev

[MarillionFan]

Hint : Crawl upmystreet and pull everything.

[jason986]

Thanks but Jibble doesn't give me the full address attached to the post code unfortunately.

Jason

[HankWangford]

You could link to this webservice from your app assuming web access is available from your clients workstations.

Take a look

services.postcodeanywhere...ByPostcode

[PerlOfWisdom]

Crawl upmystreet and pull everything.

I crawled streetmap.com for lattitude and longitudes, and it took 3 days to get the postcode sectors (eg LS4 4xx). It would take about 2 years to get the full postcode file.

[MarillionFan]

Yeh think you may be right Perl.

Interesting actually I had a look and he's right you can only get a list of the first 4 parts of the postcode.

I had the postoffice send me all of the data for SL & RG postcodes and then matched it to upmystreet.com for the socio-demographics so I could do a marketing campaign, but that took about 1.5 hours to crawl using an Excel macro.

[dotnetted]

you still looking for this?

I use AddressMap from www.arcenciel.co.uk/. Exposes both COM and .Net API's.

Costs £100 + VAT to get full UK postcodes plus full UK street-level maps.

BTW, I'm not affiliated with them in any way, like you I've gone through the list on the Royal Mail site and this lot turned out to be the cheapest and best solution for my needs.