England County Boundaries with Multiple Coastline Resolutions, December 2016

December 2016 digital vector boundaries for Counties in England, as at 31 December 2016. The dataset contains five boundary versions, including full-resolution extent and coastline-clipped versions at 20m, 200m, and 500m generalisation levels. 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 county-level administrative boundaries mentioned in the description.
• Perform spatial analysis using coastline-clipped boundaries for accurate land-based calculations.
• Develop web mapping applications using generalised (20m, 200m, 500m) boundaries for faster rendering.
• Integrate county boundaries into geographic information systems for planning and demographic studies.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions, including full-resolution (7-10 MB) and multiple generalised (1 MB to 73 KB) options for different use cases.
• Contains specific temporal coverage, representing boundaries as they existed on 31 December 2016.
• Offers boundaries clipped to the Mean High Water mark for accurate coastline representation.

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 analyses.
• Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:56.596466; freshness should be verified as the data reflects a 2016 snapshot.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics (UK), containing Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries derived from authoritative UK geospatial sources.

Time Range

31 December 2016

Freshness

Data reflects a snapshot from 31 December 2016; metadata was last updated on 2026-07-08.

Geography

Counties in England