England County Boundaries for December 2015 with Multiple Resolutions

England's 'shire' county digital vector boundaries as of 31 December 2015. The dataset contains five boundary versions, including full-resolution extents and coastline-clipped files at 20m, 200m, and 500m generalisation levels. It is provided by the Office for National Statistics and contains Ordnance Survey and ONS intellectual property.

Use Cases

• Create thematic maps of England based on county-level administrative boundaries mentioned in the description.
• Perform spatial joins with other UK datasets using the coastline-clipped boundaries.
• Optimise map rendering performance by selecting the appropriate generalised (20m, 200m, 500m) boundary file.
• Analyse coastal versus inland features using the full-extent and clipped boundary versions.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions for flexibility, from full 7-10 MB resolution to ultra-generalised 72 KB files.
• Snapshots boundaries to a specific date (31 December 2015), enabling historical analysis.
• Includes both full extent and coastline-clipped versions, allowing for different analytical needs.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale joins.
• Data reflects a single temporal snapshot (end of 2015); changes after this date are not included.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries from Ordnance Survey and ONS sources.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2015.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:38.531145; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England