Notes on Geo-Location

Postcodes come as “areas” (eg RGx xxx), “districts” (eg RG1 xxx), “sectors” (eg RG1 2xx) and “full postcodes” (eg RG1 2ST). There are various ways to work out a full postcode from your location.

1 If you know the address of a house or business near-by, you can use the Royal Mail website https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode to get the postcode. When you type the part of the address you know into the window a pull-down with lots of addresses and postcodes appears.

2 If you can use Google Maps on a smart phone use that, touch and hold on the blue dot that appears for “you” and this gives you a latitude and longitude (eg 51.xxxxxx, -2.xxxxxx). Streetmap can then turn this into a postcode (see below)

3 If you have a smart phone and have the What3Words app installed (which the NBTA recommends anyway) the W3W phrase (such as “dog.eats.biscuit”) can then be turned into a postcode using Streetmap Item 4 below. If you put a W3W phrase into Google maps (Item 2) you will get a blue location marker.

4 You can use www.streetmap.co.uk to get a map. Look for your location (you have to do this yourself). Click on the orange “move arrow” icon and click the “+” cursor on the map. Below the map it says
“Map key | Location is at xxxxxx,yyyyyy | Click here to convert coordinates. | Click here to toggle map adverts”
Click on the link in “Click here to convert coordinates” and a new window pops up giving you the lat/long coordinates, W3W and the nearest postcode.

5 You can use an app for your phone that gets the coordinates out of the GPS for you. For example the
“GPS Test” app can give you your location in lat/long or 12-digit grid reference. Streetmap can then turn either of these into a postcode.

Other geo-locating tools are available. These are ones that we know and love.