Post Code Poser

[Birchy]

How are letters and numbers allocated to postcodes? The first two letters give the town - or nearest town - but what about the rest.....is it worked on a grid system, or what?

[Moog]

I believe the first two letters are the main sorting office abbreviation eg. SY = Shrewsbury, MK = Milton Keynes, the catchment area or should that be distribution area for that office is the divided up in by smaller postal distribution centres represented by the next two number, once your letter is at the smaller sorting office it is then sorted by the second group of numbers I believe on a grid type system where the first numbers refer to an area and the letters refer to a village, street, goup of houses in that area so a bit like the reverse of an address really

[theopenworld]

The first part of the postcode (I am going to use my old one for this) 'W6', is the region (or borough if it's a large town or city). The second is a reference to a particular street or road in that region. Therefore the '0NR' refers to me living in that street. For example, when you sign-up to a website and they ask for you for just your postcode, the only other thing they need is what number you are. This therefore means you could technically put your address as '4, W6 0NR' as it does make technical sense to the sorting offices across the country.