This file contains the digital vector boundaries for Counties and Unitary Authorities in the United Kingdom, as at December 2019. The boundaries available are: (BUC) Ultra Generalised (500m) - clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark). Contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights. Download File SizesUltra Generalised (500m) - clipped to the coastline (200 KB)Units for the following fields:St_length = metresSt_area = metres2REST URL of ArcGIS for INSPIRE View Service https://ons-inspire.esriuk.com/arcgis/rest/services/Administrative_Boundaries/Counties_and_Unitary_Authorities_December_2019_Boundaries_UK_BUC2/MapServer/exts/InspireView REST URL of ArcGIS for INSPIRE Feature Download Service https://ons-inspire.esriuk.com/arcgis/rest/services/Administrative_Boundaries/Counties_and_Unitary_Authorities_December_2019_Boundaries_UK_BUC2/MapServer/exts/InspireFeatureDownload REST URL of Feature Access Service https://ons-inspire.esriuk.com/arcgis/rest/services/Administrative_Boundaries/Counties_and_Unitary_Authorities_December_2019_Boundaries_UK_BUC2/FeatureServer

The current counties of England are defined by the ceremonial counties, a collective name for the county areas to which are appointed a Lord Lieutenant. The office of Lord Lieutenant was created in the reign of Henry VIII. The Lord Lieutenant is the chief officer of the county and representative of the Crown. Whenever the Queen visits an area she will be accompanied by the Lord Lieutenant of that area. Legally the ceremonial counties are defined by the Lieutenancies Act 1997 as ‘Counties and areas for the purposes of the lieutenancies in Great Britain’ with reference to the areas used for local government.

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https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/products/boundary-line#technical

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Source:

https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/BoundaryLine

Licence:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

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Counties were formerly administrative units across the whole of the UK. Due to various administrative restructurings, however, the only administrative areas still referred to as 'counties' are the Non-Metropolitan Districts of England. The English Metropolitan Districts, although no longer administrative units, are also used for statistical purposes.

The Counties area list contains 35 areas of the following constituent English geographies:

• 27 Shire counties
• 6 Metropolitan counties
• Inner London and Outer London

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).

Local Authority is a generic term used to cover London Boroughs, Metropolitan Districts, Non-Metropolitan Districts, and Unitary Authorities in England; Unitary Authorities in Wales; Council Areas in Scotland; and Local Government Districts in Northern Ireland.

The Local Authorities area list contains 404 areas of the following constituent geographies:

• 36 Metropolitan Districts in England
• 201 Non-Metropolitan Districts in England
• 31 London Boroughs in England
• 54 Unitary Authorities in England
• 26 Local Government Districts in Northern Ireland
• 32 Council Areas in Scotland
• 22 Unitary Authorities in Wales
• 2 Census Merged Districts in England

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).

The Vice County system for Great Britain was devised by an English botanist, Hewett Cottrell Watson, for the purposes of illustrating plant distributions These digitised boundaries are available free-of-charge as a download to recorders, mapping scheme organisers, local record centres and others. This download will contain 3 datasets, an outline of GB, a zip containing individual Vice Counties and a zip containing all Vice Counties as 1 shapefile. 3 and 12 mile offshore limits are included in each zip. Data sourced from http://www.nbn.org.uk/SpecialPages/WVCB-Download.aspx and released under an Open Government Licence. GIS vector data. This dataset was first accessioned in the EDINA ShareGeo Open repository on 2013-10-31 and migrated to Edinburgh DataShare on 2017-02-22.

This file contains the digital vector boundaries for Local Authority Districts, in the United Kingdom, as at December 2022.The boundaries available are: (BFC) Full resolution - clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).Contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

REST URL of Feature Access Service – https://services1.arcgis.com/ESMARspQHYMw9BZ9/arcgis/rest/services/Local_Authority_Districts_December_2022_UK_BFC_V2/FeatureServerREST URL of WFS Server –https://dservices1.arcgis.com/ESMARspQHYMw9BZ9/arcgis/services/Local_Authority_Districts_December_2022_UK_BFC_V2/WFSServer?service=wfs&request=getcapabilitiesREST URL of Map Server –https://services1.arcgis.com/ESMARspQHYMw9BZ9/arcgis/rest/services/Local_Authority_Districts_December_2022_UK_BFC_V2/MapServer

The administrative boundaries of local authorities in England as provided by the ONS for the purposes of producing statistics.

Dataset

This dataset was created by CharlieGodfrey

Contents

Introduction Shapefile showing local authority boundaries within the UK Power Networks area (across all licence areas). District/Borough councils, Unitary Authorities, and County Councils are shown.

Methodological Approach

  Data Extraction: Static shapefiles were exported from the Office of National Statistics' website.

Source: Local Authorities, County Councils and Regions.Data Manipulation: Using our shapefile for our operational boundaries, the Open Data team has excluded any local authorities outside of our area. Local Authority boundaries are unclipped, meaning the entire boundary is shown - even if the majority of the boundary is outside our licence

Quality Control Statement
The data is provided "as is". 


Assurance Statement
The Open Data team has checked the data against source to ensure data accuracy and consistency.

Other

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Download dataset information: Metadata (JSON) Definitions of key terms related to this dataset can be found in the Open Data Portal Glossary: https://ukpowernetworks.opendatasoft.com/pages/glossary/

ArcGIS shapefile of 245polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 55 registration counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

Regions were built up of complete counties/unitary authorities so, although they were subject to change, they always reflected administrative boundaries as at the end of the previous year.

The Region area list contains nine areas for English Regions, and provides coverage of England only.

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).

Dataset

This dataset was created by Lauren Ackerman

Released under Other (specified in description)

Contents

This is the ONS Postcode Directory (ONSPD) for the United Kingdom as at February 2024 in Comma Separated Variable (CSV) and ASCII text (TXT) formats. This file contains the multi CSVs so that postcode areas can be opened in MS Excel. To download the zip file click the Download button. The ONSPD relates both current and terminated postcodes in the United Kingdom to a range of current statutory administrative, electoral, health and other area geographies. It also links postcodes to pre-2002 health areas, 1991 Census enumeration districts for England and Wales, 2001 Census Output Areas (OA) and Super Output Areas (SOA) for England and Wales, 2001 Census OAs and SOAs for Northern Ireland and 2001 Census OAs and Data Zones (DZ) for Scotland. It now contains 2021 Census OAs and SOAs for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It helps support the production of area-based statistics from postcoded data. The ONSPD is produced by ONS Geography, who provide geographic support to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and geographic services used by other organisations. The ONSPD is issued quarterly. (File size - 231 MB) Please note that this product contains Royal Mail, Gridlink, LPS (Northern Ireland), Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

WFD River Basin Districts is a polygon Shapefile dataset containing attributes that have been collated as defined for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Article 2, clause 2 of the WFD defines them as '…the area of land and sea, made up of one or more neighbouring river basins together with their associated groundwaters and coastal waters…'. River Basin Districts have been delineated by using River Catchments as “building blocks” that have been aggregated together within a GIS, ensuring that WFD rivers do not intersect boundaries. Coastal and transitional waterbodies are also merged and assigned to a river basin district. River Catchments were delineated through use of flow data and a digital terrain model run through a hydrological model. These data apply to Cycle 2 of the Water Framework Directive. The equivalent layer for Cycle 1 is covered by AfA081. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved.

The 1885 UK parliamentary constituencies for Ireland were re-created in 2017 as part of a conference paper delivered at the Southern Irish Loyalism in Context conference at Maynooth University. The intial map only included the territory of the Irish Free State and was created by Martin Charlton and Jack Kavanagh. The remaining six counties of Ulster were completed by Eoin McLaughlin in 2018-19, the combined result is a GIS map of all the parliamentary constituecies across the island of Ireland for the period 1885-1918. The map is available in both ESRI Shapefile format and as a GeoPackage (GPKG). The methodology for creating the constituencies is outlined in detail below.

Methodology

A map showing the outlines of the 1855 – 1918 Constituency boundaries can be found on page 401 of Parliamentary Elections in Ireland, 1801-1922 (Dublin, 1978) by Brian Walker. This forms the basis for the creation of a set of digital boundaries which can then be used in a GIS. The general workflow involves allocating an 1885 Constituency identifier to each of the 309 Electoral Divisions present in the boundaries made available for the 2011 Census of Population data release by CSO. The ED boundaries are available in ‘shapefile’ format (a de facto standard for spatial data transfer). Once a Constituency identifier has been given to each ED, the GIS operation known as ‘dissolve’ is used to remove the boundaries between EDs in the same Constituency. To begin with Walker’s map was scanned at 1200 dots per inch in JPEG form. A scanned map cannot be linked to other spatial data without undergoing a process known as georeferencing. The CSO boundaries are available with spatial coordinates in the Irish National Grid system. The goal of georeferencing is to produce a rectified version of the map together with a world file. Rectification refers to the process of recomputing the pixel positions in the scanned map so that they are oriented with the ING coordinate system; the world file contains the extent in both the east-west and north-south directions of each pixel (in metres) and the coordinates of the most north-westerly pixel in the rectified image.

Georeferencing involves the identification of Ground Control Points – these are locations on the scanned map for which the spatial coordinates in ING are known. The Georeferencing option in ArcGIS 10.4 makes this a reasonably pain free task. For this map 36 GCPs were required for a local spline transformation. The Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 provides the legal basis for the constituencies to be used for future elections in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Part III of the Seventh Schedule of the Act defines the Constituencies in terms of Baronies, Parishes (and part Parishes) and Townlands for Ireland. Part III of the Sixth Schedule provides definitions for the Boroughs of Belfast and Dublin.

The CSO boundary collection also includes a shapefile of Barony boundaries. This makes it possible code a barony in two ways: (i) allocated completely to a Division or (ii) split between two Divisions. For the first type, the code is just the division name, and for the second the code includes both (or more) division names. Allocation of these names to the data in the ED shapefile is accomplished by a spatial join operation. Recoding the areas in the split Baronies is done interactively using the GIS software’s editing option. EDs or groups of EDs can be selected on the screen, and the correct Division code updated in the attribute table. There are a handful of cases where an ED is split between divisions, so a simple ‘majority’ rule was used for the allocation. As the maps are to be used at mainly for displaying data at the national level, a misallocation is unlikely to be noticed. The final set of boundaries was created using the dissolve operation mentioned earlier. There were a dozen ED that had initially escaped being allocated a code, but these were quickly updated. Similarly, a few of the EDs in the split divisions had been overlooked; again updating was painless. This meant that the dissolve had to be run a few more times before all the errors have been corrected.

For the Northern Ireland districts, a slightly different methodology was deployed which involved linking parishes and townlands along side baronies, using open data sources from the OSM Townlands.ie project and OpenData NI.

This GIS shapefile provides boundary and attribute data for the parishes and places enumerated in the 1851 census for England and Wales. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced to a very high standard by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver in 2001, which was expertly converted into a single GIS of some 28000 polygons by Burton et al in 2004. However, what they produced was not yet ready for the mapping of census data due to a modest number (<10%) of administrative units which either lacked boundaries, were unlocated, had labelling errors, or incorrect census numbers. The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 research programme undertook the task of enhancing the Burton et al. GIS to provide a comprehensive shapefile of parish and places as listed in the 1851 and 1831 censuses for the mapping of demographic and occupational data with tolerable accuracy for the whole of England and Wales. To this end it was also decided to add additional attributes concerning counties, hundreds and boroughs in 1831, counties in 1851 and registration sub-districts, districts and counties in 1851 from which shapefiles of these different larger scale administrative units could be assembled.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

INSPIRE Cadastral Parcels is a dataset maintained and produced by the Registers of Scotland to comply with the INSPIRE Directive. It is a sub-set of the Cadastral Map and contains the location of ownership polygons at ground level in Scotland. The polygons contained within the dataset are shapes that show the position and indicative extent of ownership of the earth’s surface for each registered property. Each cadastral parcel has a unique identifier called the inspire id that relates to a registered title on Scotland’s Land Register. The extent of rights and land contained within a title registered in the land register cannot be established from the cadastral parcel. This service provides access to each of the 33 Registration Counties as a pre-defined dataset in ESRI Shapefile format. For more detailed information on land and property data in Scotland you can search free at https://scotlis.ros.gov.uk/.

This collection consists of ESRI shapefiles for Glasgow around 1910:

• sanitary district boundaries in 1903 (Sanitary_Districts.shp, etc.)
• municipal ward boundaries in 1912 (Wards_1912.shp, etc.)
• registration district boundaries within the area of the City of Glasgow in 1913 (Registration_Districts.shp, etc.)
• routes of main rivers (River Clyde and River Kelvin) around 1915 (Rivers.shp, etc.)
• route of the Glasgow Subway around 1915 (Subway.shp, etc.)

For details of shapefile construction, please see the descriptions in the following article:

Angelopoulos, K., Stewart, G. and Mancy, R. Local infectious disease experience influences vaccine refusal rates: a natural experiment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2022.1986.

Details of construction and references to original map sources are provided in the second paragraph of the section "Geographic conversion" in the online supplementary materials of the above reference. Further information about the boundaries is provided in the caption of Figure S1 of the supplementary materials. Additional contextual information is provided in both the main text and supplementary materials.

WFD River Basin Districts is a polygon Shapefile dataset containing attributes that have been defined for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). as '…the area of land and sea, made up of one or more neighbouring river basins together with their associated groundwaters and coastal waters…'. River Basin Districts have been delineated by using River Catchments as “building blocks” that have been aggregated together within a GIS, ensuring that WFD rivers do not intersect boundaries. Coastal and transitional waterbodies are also merged and assigned to a river basin district. River Catchments were delineated through use of flow data and a digital terrain model run through a hydrological model. This dataset was previously known as WFD River Basin Districts. These data apply to Cycle 1 of the Water Framework Directive. The equivalent layer for Cycle 2 is covered under WFD River Basin Districts Cycle 2. Please note that the Environment Agency no longer provide data for water bodies in Wales - this should now available from Natural Resources Wales.

Output Area is the lowest geographical level at which census estimates are provided. Output Areas were introduced in Scotland at the 1981 Census and in all the countries of the UK at the 2001 Census.

The Output Areas and Small Areas list contains 232,296 areas of the following constituent geographies:

• 171,372 Output Areas in England
• 46,351 Output Areas in Scotland
• 4,537 Small Areas in Northern Ireland
• 10,036 Output Areas in Wales

Please visit ONS Beginner's Guide to UK Geography for more info.

The boundaries are available as either extent of the realm (usually this is the Mean Low Water mark but in some cases boundaries extend beyond this to include off shore islands) or

clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark).