Counties and Unitary Authorities Boundaries for England and Wales, December 2016

Office for National Statistics provides digital vector boundaries for Counties and Unitary Authorities in England and Wales as of December 2016. The dataset includes five boundary resolutions, from full resolution (17-22 MB) to ultra generalised (168 KB), clipped to the coastline. It contains Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights and is available via multiple file formats and an ArcGIS REST service.

Use Cases

• Create thematic maps based on administrative units in England and Wales.
• Perform spatial joins with other datasets using the provided boundary geometries.
• Optimize map rendering performance by selecting an appropriate generalised boundary resolution.
• Analyze coastal administrative extents using the clipped-to-coastline boundaries.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary resolutions, with file sizes ranging from 168 KB to 22 MB.
• Contains boundaries for both England and Wales as of a specific date (December 2016).
• Includes boundaries clipped to the coastline (Mean High Water mark) for accurate coastal representation.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to uk_data, covering only England and Wales.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Time Range

December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:44.513938; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England and Wales