UKBORDERS is the Geography Data Support Unit for the ESRC Census Programme. UKBORDERS focus is on Digital Boundaries and postcode directories.

Access to UKBORDERS service requires registration with the ESRC Census programme at Census.ac.uk.

After logging in – users are presented with the UKBORDERS homepage. News is shown in the box at the top. This includes details of workshops and other training events.

There are 5 core UKBORDERS facilities – these provide access to different types of data.

Supporting pages provide information about the datasets within the service

… as well as a comprehensive set of help pages

Here is an example of a help page, in this case describing the hierarchy of postcode geography.

Let's look at each of the 5 tools within UKBORDERS in turn, starting with Postcode Directory Download.

Postcode Directory Download provides access to complete national postcode directories from 1980 to the latest version released by the Office for National Statistics.

Data is supplied in different table formats. A complete national postcode directory is a large file though.

Postcode Data Selector provides a more flexible means of obtaining data from postcode directories.

Postcode Directories from 2001 onwards are available through Postcode Data Selector. If you need postcode data from before 2001 you need to access data through Postcode Directory Download.

We pick one of the versions of the postcode directories available

Postcode Directory Download lists the postcode areas and the fields themselves that are available in the dataset. We can drill down through the geography to select only the postcodes that we need.

We drill down to Postcode Sector level

... and tell Postcode Data Selector that we want all postcodes that start with EH6 4; EH6 6 and EH6 8

For these postcodes we then tell Postcode Data Selector what fields from the input postcode directory are to be included in the output and specify the output format.

We've looked at tools that provide access to postcodes. The majority of UKBORDERS datasets are digital boundaries. These are exposed through the Easy Download and Boundary Data Selector tools. Let's look at Easy Download now.

The UKBORDERS collection holds over 300 boundaries covering a range of themes from 1840 to the present day. Easy Download provides quick access to the most popular boundary datasets.

Here we can see the popular Scottish boundary datasets that are available through Easy Download. Each Easy Download dataset is provided as a ready to use dataset in popular GIS/CAD data formats.

Easy Download also provides access to Look Up Tables from the 2001 census

…and a number of other datasets that are not available anywhere else through UKBORDERS.

Let's look at Boundary Data Selector. Boundary Data Selector provides flexible access to the complete collection of digital boundaries that the form the UKBORDERS collection.

Boundary Data Selector is made up from 3 tabs.

Tab1 – What and Where? Allows us to specify What type of boundary we wish to extract from UKBORDERS and where within the UK to obtain the data for. First we specify what type of boundary using the 3 dropdowns and the Find button. Here we specify that we want boundaries for Scotland…

… we also want these boundaries for Scotland to be Census boundaries…

… and we want them to be from 1999 onwards. Clicking the Find button lists all boundaries in UKBORDERS that meet this set of criteria.

We want Scottish Output Areas for We now want to select only Output Areas for a sub- region of the South Ayrshire Council Area.

So we drill down to select all OAs that nest within the Ayr Fort Scottish Standard Table Ward

Tab 2 - Map View tab allows us to preview our boundary selection on a map.

Tab 3 - format tab allows us to specify the data format that the boundary dataset is to be delivered in. What we choose here will depend on the GIS/CAD application that we will be using.

Having told UKBORDERS what data we want it goes away and extracts the data for us.

We click on the link to download the dataset.

and we can then view the downloaded dataset in our GIS/CAD application.

The final tool available within UKBORDERS allows us to view geospatial Metadata records relating to the datasets available through the service. Let's take a look.

Metadata allows us to identify whether a dataset is suitable for our purposes and provides information about the contents of that dataset. Here we search UKBORDERS metadata records for the term “county”

All of these metadata records match this search term & each record has associated with it a ukborders dataset. We can explore the contents of each metadata record.

In short form online

… and as a complete PDF document which can be downloaded and then stored locally with any data we extract from UKBORDERS.