Mizter T wrote:

You watch even less television than I do then! BBC television used to
cover London as part of the South East region (perhaps officially
called "London & South East", I dunno), but in 2001 this was split -
London became a region in its own right, whilst the South East region
swallowed a transmitter from the South region and started a new
regional television news service that comes I think from Tunbridge
Wells.

Whilst true the London region broadcasts go some way beyond the boundaries -
my parents in Epsom have always had London regional television for
instance - and I *think* the scope of regional news reflects this. (Although
regional political coverage is pretty much just the GLA and London
Boroughs.)

In article , (Roland
Perry) wrote:

In message
,
at 03:01:54 on Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Mizter T
remarked:
*Total nonsense* - postal counties are not required any more

By whom? As recounted earlier, many web forms insist on a County.

Web forms frequently show pure ignorance on addressing.

One of their more seriously wrong assumptions is that house number plus
postcode is a unique location. Someone else paid a friend's electricity
bill for several years as a result of that nonsense. I found my bank
making the same wrong assumption only on Friday.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

On 19 July, 20:52, "Tim Roll-Pickering" T.C.Roll-
wrote:
Mizter T wrote:
No - the official Royal Mail requirement to include postal counties
continued past the creation of Greater London. I'll try and find the
date when the requirement was dropped.

It was in 1996.

Most English postal counties *did* change in the local government
reorganisations of the 1960s & 1970s, with the following exceptions:

* London was not changed due to stretched finances in the 1960s.
* Middlesex continued to be used except for Potters Bar which was move to
Hertfordshire.
* Herefordshire and Worcestershire were kept separate.
* Humberside was split into North Humberside and South Humberside.
* Greater Manchester was not introduced in the 1970s because of potential
confusion with the "Manchester" postal town.

The E4 postcode is part of the London postal district. "Greater
London" has absolutely *no meaning* whatsoever in a postal address
sense - cast-iron fact.

Not totally. Since 1996 the county field has been optional and people have
been able to use what they like, and "Greater London" (or even just
"London") is a valid county entry.



The Royal Mail advice long before 1996 was that the county was not
needed for obvious large towns and cities, if at all, and that would
surely include London. In fact, the county could be inferred to be
optional by the fact that they focussed on the importance of the post
town and postcode.

You seem to have implied that something was required after LONDON
until 1996, but it definitely wasn't. I can't remember checking the
Royal Mail advice before the mid 1980s, but the advice then seems to
have been almost identical to now except that they've stopped even
mentioning the county. I can't remember it being insisted on.

Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:
Mizter T wrote:

No - the official Royal Mail requirement to include postal counties
continued past the creation of Greater London. I'll try and find the
date when the requirement was dropped.

It was in 1996.

Most English postal counties *did* change in the local government
reorganisations of the 1960s & 1970s, with the following exceptions:

* London was not changed due to stretched finances in the 1960s.
* Middlesex continued to be used except for Potters Bar which was move to
Hertfordshire.
* Herefordshire and Worcestershire were kept separate.
* Humberside was split into North Humberside and South Humberside.

Not that many locals would use the word in their addresses, especially
after it was put out of its misery in 1996.

One of the arguments its (few) supporters used was that some local
companies had put Humberside in their names. Then someone else looked at
how many had Yorkshire or Lincolnshire in their names...

--
Arthur Figgis

On Jul 19, 7:30*am, "tim....." wrote:
"Roland Perry" wrote in message

...

In message
, at
04:00:47 on Sun, 19 Jul 2009, John B remarked:
My father lives in India and has a +44 20 phone number. My office is
in Islington and has an +1 646 phone number.

Are they VoIP?

Yup.

And they are well known to mean very little.

By people who can tell the difference.

I am well versed in the current telecom situation

and I haven't the faintest idea what number range is allocated to stand
alone VOIP connections.

I doubt that the man in the street even knows what we are talking about.

tim

VoIP numbers with accomodation addresses are very useful in giving one
a virtial presence. I have +44 23 (Portsmounth), +44 1243
(Chichester), +44 113 (Leeds), +44 7 (UK Mobile), + 1 714 (Anaheim),
+1 310 (Beverly Hills), and +1 (775) (Reno) numbers. Family Friends
and business contacts can all reach me easily, and inexpensively, with
local numbers regardless of where I may at any given ttime.

In uk.transport.london message ebf97407-1b18-47b0-8820-1c4ef6dc7169@c1g
2000yqi.googlegroups.com, Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:37:24, John B
posted:

[as a side note, I utterly hate American-designed websites which
insist on you putting a county in the address field... especially the
ones that force you to pick from a list a county that doesn't
exist...]

Go via http://spaceweather.com/flybys/index.php, look via "London,
City of" and you will find Cockfosters and the Finchley/Barnet area, as
well as London.

--
(c) John Stockton, nr London UK. BP7, Delphi 3 & 2006.
URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ TP/BP/Delphi/&c., FAQqy topics & links;
URL:http://www.bancoems.com/CompLangPascalDelphiMisc-MiniFAQ.htm clpdmFAQ;
NOT URL:http://support.codegear.com/newsgroups/: news:borland.* Guidelines

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:33:12 -0700 (PDT), Mizter T
wrote:


On Jul 19, 4:54*am, Charles Ellson wrote:

[snip]

There are also areas outwith the capital (e.g. Hampstead Heath, Queens
Park) which are its responsibility, not that of the containing local
authority; this extends to having their own constabulary patrolling
Hampstead Heath.

There you're taking the City of London to be the "capital". There is
however no officially or legally defined "capital" of the UK, nor
indeed of England

It was official according to whichever monarch changed it from
Winchester in the 12th(?) century. There is more to English Law than
mere statutes.

- so whether the capital is specifically the City of
London, or some wider notion of London,

"Some wider notion" of London is not a city thus cannot be the capital
city.

is itself something of a moot
point. I'd suggest that one could argue for a wider definition of
London being the capital 'by convention' (as opposed to 'by law'), not
least because government is centred on Westminster

The location of the government is irrelevant, other countries have
their governments outwith their capitals.

as opposed to the
square mile - however there's never going to be a definitive answer to
this, because "capital" is not defined.

The UK is not alone here - for example France has no (official)
capital city either.

So that's about 436,000 gouv.fr web pages you need to alter. The year
987 or thereabouts would probably get you at least one mark in a
French primary school exam.

Steve Fitzgerald ] wrote on 19 July 2009 19:02:39 ...
In message , Peter Masson
writes

There is also a good practical reason for including the unnecessary
county in a postal address. Letters addressed to
CHISLEHURST
BR7 5xx
have not infrequently arrived late with a spurious Bristol postmark.
This does't seem to happen when they are addressed
CHISLEHURST Kent
BR7 5xx

There are also cases where two post towns in different parts of the
country share a name (Ashford, Richmond, etc). While the correct
postcode does differentiate, inclusion of the county name does reduce
the risk of misrouting.
Bearing in mind that the routing is done electronically by 'outbound
postcode' only, ie. the first portion, BR7 in your example, I fail to
see how adding the county can have any effect on this at all as it's
not even read by the system.

If the electronic reader fails to register the postcode (especially if
the address is handwritten) and the item is rejected for manual
sorting, it is only too easy for the Mk1 human eyeball to misread BR7
5xx as Bristol.

The Mk1 eyeball can't differentiate between an S and an R?

The problem is that the Mk1 brain interprets BR... as Bristol,
forgetting that Bristol is BS. Indeed, I find it surprising that, as a
major city, Bristol wasn't allocated BR, which would have meant that the
mere suburb of Bromley (though it's my birthplace!) would have used,
say, BM.

--
Richard J.
(to email me, swap 'uk' and 'yon' in address)

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:32:10 -0700 (PDT), John B
wrote:

On Jul 19, 10:55*am, Mizter T wrote:
Lots of places have signs but no distinct government. I think I've seen
"England" on signs, and even "London" is rather complex concept to pin
down as a specific "thing".

England exists, legally, though - e.g. the Department of [English]
Health.

Rubbish - see Charles Ellson's answer. The Department of Health has a
whole number of UK-wide responsibilities as well as its (primary)
responsibility for healthcare in England and Wales.

ITYM 'in England', not 'in England and Wales'.

England does of course exist legally - though there are a number of
areas where a reference to England is actually an abbreviated
reference to England *and* Wales (e.g. reference to contracts being
enforced according to "English law" in "English courts"). In the past
one could have said that constitutionally Wales was basically part of
England, but with devolution this description would be less apt.

That's why I used the DoH as an example, as Englandandwales is a
single entity for most legal and non-devolved governmental purposes.

Not since 1978 through the successive effects of the Welsh Language
Act 1967, the Local Government Act 1972 and the Interpretation Act
1978; the latter Act has references to "England and Wales" but defines
them separately as "England" and "Wales".

London is easy: the Corporation's area is the City of London, the GLA
area is Greater London, and there isn't anything else.

Yes there is. There's the London postal district - and there's a whole
number of places within Greater London that are outwith the London
postal district (e.g. in the south east fringes there's lots of places
with "Bromley" as the post town and hence BRx postcodes

Is there a London postal district? AIUI, there are various postcodes
that fall within Greater London, including E ones, BR ones, and so on.
Some of these sorting offices also cover areas outside London.

A "London Postal District" was a sub-division (defined by points of
the compass, i.e. N, W, E, NW, SE, SW, EC, WC) of the "London Postal
Area". Modern Royal Mail arrangements do not conform to the associated
boundaries although they still define postcode areas. The London
Postal Area was larger than the County of London but smaller than the
present Greater London.

Similarly, I'm sure there are pizza establishments in outer London
that deliver to Hertfordshire, Essex, Surrey and Kent, and pizza
establishments in Herts, Essex, Surrey and Kent that deliver to
London.

They'll probably deliver to Dublin if you pay enough.

- back when
the postal county was properly included as part of the address, these
places would have had Kent in their address too, and many people still
continue to include it).

And back when they were in Kent, they were in Kent. This isn't
relevant now.

So somebody gives you an address in Hayes sans postcode or locality...

Sewardstone, near Epping Forest, meanwhile is outside Greater London
but has a London postcode - E4.

It has a postcode that's primarily used within Greater London, yes.
I'm surprised by that actually - how did the PO's E district get so
far out...?

It covered large parts of Essex until 1965.

The London telephone dialling code 020 covers a larger area than the
London postal district, including many places outside of Greater
London. Meanwhile other places on the edges of Greater London have
dialling codes other than 020 London.

My father lives in India and has a +44 20 phone number. My office is
in Islington and has an +1 646 phone number. Are BT phone numbers even
still /supposed/ to be geographical?

There are various practical reasons for doing so.

The Met Police District used to cover an area larger than Greater
London, but this was rationalised when the GLA was created and these
areas were transferred to the appropriate home counties police force.

ie this isn't relevant now.

It would be if older legislation was deleted rather than amended by
later legislation, but that is not how things work in the UK.

The London fares (aka Travelcard) zones of course cover an area larger
than Greater London - and that's the case even if we're only talking
about the 'proper' zones 1-6.

'The TfL zonal area'. Yes, OK, I'll give you that one, ish.

I think there's a number of other examples where an official or quasi-
official body of one sort or another defines London in different ways.

Examples (from the present day)?

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:34:12 +0100, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message , at 14:15:56 on
Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Recliner remarked:
There *is* an underlying technical issue, in that out-of-area codes
don't scale, because they involve running wires from one exchange to
the other.

Surely it's all done with software now? In any case, the exchanges are
now connected by high bandwidth glass, not copper wire.

The software switches calls within the exchange, but they have to get
there first.

I'm not sure if it does any more. ISTR the exchange "owning" the
number now rejects the call and instructs the originating exchange
where to send it (all done in milliseconds) BICBW. The older version
on some exchanges required use of a directory number at the exchange
actually serving the subscriber to which calls were silently diverted
by the exchange which "owned" the number; IIRC that became unneccesary
once everything was replaced by System X or newer.

The originating exchange can only send to the receiving
exchange specified by the code (there won't be an "exception routing
table" for the out-of-area numbers). And that exchange then has to
deliver the call to a distant POTs line.

ITYF that like 0345, 0845 etc. it can deliver to a "numberless"
circuit.

That latter connection might
well be done by a MUX at both ends and fibre in between, but that too
doesn't scale very well, and isn't inherently cheaper than a leased line
between those two points.