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I'm working on a web project that requires polygons and lat/long coordinates for the boundaries of towns, cities, counties, and postcodes.

Does anyone know where I can obtain this data?

I know rightmove has it, but can't figure out where they get it from.

rightmove web site

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For administrative boundaries, GADM is always the best free source:

http://www.gadm.org/download

adm_2 includes the counties and larger town boundaries.

If you need more, have a look at what Ordnance Survey offers as OpenData:

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/boundary-line.html

For the post code data (which is not published freely), see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_UK_Postcodes

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  • Thanks for your help, do you know how to turn the boundary-line data into lat long coordinates?
    – Sofia Rose
    Jan 11, 2014 at 6:25
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    @SofiaRose Welcome to GIS SE! Our protocols can take a little getting used to but something that I can let you know about is that "supplemental" questions in Comments like this one would be best raised as a new Question (if you cannot already find an Answer to it in another of our 28,000+ Questions).
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Jan 11, 2014 at 6:37
  • You can load the data into QGIS, and export the geometry with the MMQGIS plugin into a file with comma separated values.
    – AndreJ
    Jan 11, 2014 at 7:41
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To answer the other aspect of your question - there is no formal boundary/definition of towns in the UK as best I'm aware of. Many products use "Urban areas", but everyone has a different definition; some organisations (i.e. the Ordnance Survey) even use different definitions for different products.

That said, you can get Urban Areas from either Meridian 2 or Strategi - both OS OpenData products. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html

As with boundaryLine, you'll have to convert it to Lat/Lon, but that's easy (see Derive WGS84 Longitude & Latitude from British Northings & Eastings for starters).

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After trying several resources, the simplest way was to go to GADM (as per AndreJ's answer) and download the level 3 .kml file and converted it to GEOJSON (which is lat/long) at https://mygeodata.cloud/converter/kmz-to-latlong

EDIT: Someone has indexed this already this here: https://github.com/martinjc/UK-GeoJSON

Edit 2: And to simplify even further with a visual tool - https://mapshaper.org/

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  • GeoJSON is long/lat
    – nmtoken
    Nov 18, 2018 at 15:12

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