On Jul 20, 3:47*pm, Martin Edwards wrote:
It was never properly included. *Postcodes were trialled in Watford and
we were told from the outset not to put the county name.

Yeah, that's perhaps because Watford was a major post town not
requiring a county. There were 110 of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postal_county#Usage ) has a list.

The 'canonical' address for everywhere outside these 110 post towns
did have a "postal county" until 1996. These matched no given set of
ceremonial, geographic, or historic counties, including Middlesex (two
detached segments in north-west London, including Spelthorne which was
added to Surrey, but not including Potters Bar, which was added to
Hertfordshire at the same time), Merseyside, North Humberside, but no
Greater Manchester, Rutland, or Huntingdonshire.

A bit weirdly, recently, the "former postal county" field in one of
the post office databases has been changed to 'Rutland' for LE15 and
part of LE16. This rewrites history for the sake of some campaigners
who found it offensive that they were continuing to get mailshots from
people including 'Leicestershire' in their address - it would have
been better in my opinion to cease supplying the field entirely, or
make it much harder to get hold of, in the hope that people supplying
such mailshots would start using the canonical addresses! This is of
course making it much harder to justify the continued existence of
'North Humberside' and 'South Humberside' in that database, so expect
to see those gone soon too.

--
Abi