County Boundaries for England as of December 2015

Digital vector boundaries for 'shire' counties in England as of 31 December 2015. The dataset contains multiple boundary versions, including full-resolution extents and coastline-clipped generalisations. It is provided by the Office for National Statistics and contains Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Create thematic maps of England based on the provided county boundaries.
• Perform spatial joins with other datasets using the coastline-clipped generalised boundaries.
• Analyze administrative region extents using the full-resolution boundaries that include offshore islands.
• Develop lightweight web mapping applications using the ultra generalised (500m) boundary files.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions, including full-resolution and four generalised/clipped options.
• Specific file sizes are listed for each boundary type, with the smallest being 72 KB.
• Boundaries are temporally precise, representing the administrative state as of 31 December 2015.

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, focusing only on England.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Time Range

As of 31 December 2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:43.910314; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England