On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 10:20:07 +0000, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
-sept
ember.org, at 09:20:58 on Fri, 22 Jan 2016, Recliner
remarked:
The Royal Mail dropped county names from addresses years ago.

Yes, but too many web forms still make it a mandatory field, probably
because they were originally designed to collect US addresses.

Not literally so, because US addresses don't include the county. In
general they are shorter than UK addresses, only having Street, Town,
State (universally abbreviated) and Zipcode.

For example, Microsoft is: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052-7329.
No mention at all of King County.

I know. I meant that they insist on a county here because a state is
mandatory in US addresses. Web site designers think they've
internationalised a US site for the UK by changing the State field name
into County.

I wonder if we could thwart them by typing "England" as the county and
"European Union" as the country?

ps We do still have some counties in our addresses; places in
Peterborough for example, which is a County. Although in any event
Peterborough is a "Post Town".

The post town should be abolished, as we have the post code. It often misleads strangers who not
unreasonably follow signposts to it but can find themselves miles away from their intended
destination.