The Index of Place Names (IPN) in Great Britain is published by the Office for National Statistics.
The IPN is a list of "places" in Great Britain. For each "place" included, the IPN lists which areas that place is located within, for each of a set of administrative geographies. The latest edition of the IPN (published July 2016) contains 87,338 entries. [1]
An Index of Place Names was first produced for the 1831 Census. The last Index to be produced as a separate Census volume was published in 1985. Since then the IPN has been available in electronic format, initially as a CD, and, more recently, as a download. The most recent version can be downloaded for free as a CSV file through the ONS Open Geography Portal. A searchable online version of the IPN is also available on the ONS Open Geography Portal. [2]
All place names are assigned to the appropriate administrative areas existing as at 31 December 2015. The Index gives some alternative names for places, as well as Welsh-language names where appropriate. The 2016 edition of the IPN is the first to also feature Scottish place names.
The following types of "place" are included in the IPN (the IPN Place Name Type Code is in brackets):
Each record in the IPN relates the place name to the following fields (the IPN Field Name is in brackets after the description):
In the fields which present a code, the IPN uses the Government Statistical Service (GSS) standard 9-character codes.
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The ONS Open Geography portal from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides free and open access to the definitive source of geographic information products, web applications, story maps, services and APIs. All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, unless otherwise stated.
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