I have for ages been trying to get thing in the paper about postcodes, but I’m constantly met with commissioning editors’ blank silence on the end of the phone as I go: “No it’s interesting! It is! It is!?” and so I gave up. But I’ve got to tell someone!! And it might as well be you.
So the thing is that if your house has a weird or inaccurate postcode, or the postcode that you have been assigned sends deliverymen and – more important – the emergency services to a McDonald’s three miles way, there is a solution!
All you have to do is write an email to Royal Mail explaining this problem (and it is such a goddamned bore if you do have this problem) and they will most probably assign you a new, more accurate postcode! The email address is addressmaintenance@royalmail.com.
They did for us in our house in Gloucestershire and I am slobberingly grateful for it.
Royal Mail’s records are updated within 48 hours but it can take SatNavs, (who buy new and updated information from Ordnance Survey), up to six weeks to register a new postcode.
Anyway that’s it. For some of you this will be like a thunderbolt and will change your lives. And for that, you are most welcome.
THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY HELPFUL.
For the last 4 years I’ve been standing at the edge of our drive, frantically waving at every passing van/car to signal where our house is.
This blog post is on a par of usefulness with the one you posted in the Summer featuring the green ASOS jumpsuit, for which I have received no end of compliments.
Stick around, Katy xx
That’s good to know – thank you.
Actually, this is very interesting. I haven’t read your posts for a while due to busy, busy, crazy busy stuff but when I saw the first line of this post I thought, ‘yes, I’ll read that thanks.’ Tsk! What do the papers know? So, now I am in the know. Brilliant!
This is so helpful! For years we contended with irate deliverymen turning up at random farms on wrong side of mountain, Openreach not finding the place when phone line down etc. Had no idea this was possible.
Nina it IS possible! Not only that, Royal Mail are helpful and polite and keen to locate you with your own postcode! It’s the dream x
this assumes people with sat navs that need updating actually update them.
We live on a road where the road layout was changed to a complete reversal of the one-way system with added bits of roads, 4 yrs later we still get people driving the wrong way along, even locals who only occasionaly need this part of town don’t read no-entry and no left turn signs.
I believe the only reason there have not been big accidents is that it’s max 30mph (going from a total stop) and usually cars parked both sides of the road.
I’m glad you have solved your courier problems. some couriers here are a little slack with reading addresses
Over the years it is never the postcode which has been the problem but how our road was labelled. The lower half is numbered (the builder built these first) . And then finished off the road a bit later so the upper half had to be named (all slightly bonkers names by the newly bought owners). Some delivery drivers struggle and we’ve stood in the middle of the road directing them but our postie is a gem!
From a business perspective (having to book parcels in for collection) it is the newer builds where postcodes are sometimes completely wrong and claim houses or hotels don’t exist. I tried to send a parcel to one of the newer Heathrow hotels and the database had no clue they existed. The databases also have a bit of an issue with some London city addresses. It’s also the multiple named industrial estate units where it can get a bit confusing.