Talk:DN postcode area

DN55
Can anyone find a source on what DN55 is used for? I have a water bill here and the undelivered address, interestingly, is "Royal Mail, Undelivered Post Department, Doncaster, DN55 1HX". I believe there used to be a returned mail centre somewhere near Belfast which was closed down in the last few years (although can't now find verification). Has a new one sprung up in Doncaster, dealing with undeliverables from large volume senders? If you put DN55 into Google Maps it takes you to a Royal Mail building (judging by all the red vehicles around) not too far from Hyde Park. It would make sense for a seperate district to be used for handling a lot of post, a bit like DVLA and others have dedicated districts. Anyone know any more? 79.68.182.42 (talk) 14:32, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Belated answer: DN55 is used for Royal Mail's physical-to-electronic (PTE) document scanning service. Organisations can pay Royal Mail to scan and forward by email post sent to DN55 postcodes such as DN55 1PT. Have added an appropriate row at DN postcode area. (DN55 is already listed in the national List of postcode districts in the United Kingdom.) — Richardguk (talk) 17:13, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Postcode Sectors
What do people think about creating separate articles for each postcode sector detailing postcodes in each, the lead paragraph could give a brief description of the area the sector covers followed by a table showing which streets/houses each postcode covers. Paul 2387 chat  15:09, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
 * May be best to discuss more centrally as you would need to do it for each of the postcode areas. Do not know where would be best place but possibly Wikipedia talk:UK Wikipedians' notice board though not very active. Keith D (talk) 16:30, 4 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Paul, are you referring to postcode districts (DN1 to D41) rather than sectors (which are subdivisions of districts, including the digit after the space in each postcode: DN1 1 to DN41 8)? Though sectors are the key geographical unit used by Royal Mail, I think Wikipedia is right to limit itself to district-level information, because more detailed information would be harder to maintain (sectors change more often than districts). For most readers, there is a trade-off between quantity and quality of information in an article. I would suggest that Wikipedia is not well suited to providing very detailed information such as sector-level or street-level coverage, because too few editors would be knowledgable enough and active enough to create such detailed postcode information covering more than a tiny proportion of the UK, and to keep such a myriad of articles up to date and defended from vandalism.
 * Though each place is unique, and some postcode districts are better known than others, I would suggest that it is best to present readers with a fairly consistent presentation of postcodes throughout the British postcode areas, so that the articles form a consistent and accessible series from AB to ZE.
 * Infobox UK place already provides links from individual places to the relevant postcode areas and post towns, and it is always possible to give further information in individual placename articles if postcodes have a particular significance in specific places (such as gang names, community boundaries etc).
 * District article stubs would be more obscure than the existing area articles, and so would be less likely to be read and harder to maintain and monitor for vandalism. District articles have been deleted in the past.
 * Instead, I would suggest putting any written boundary descriptions in a "Boundaries" section within the relevant area article, as with E postcode area (brief descriptions) or EC postcode area (more detailed text).
 * I am working on producing a detailed map for each area article, showing the coverage of each district and post town, which I hope will complement the existing #Coverage tables in each of the articles. I have already produced a national map of all the areas, discussed at Commons here.
 * — Richardguk (talk) 16:33, 4 February 2012 (UTC)