County Boundaries in England as of December 2016

Digital vector boundaries for Counties in England, as at 31 December 2016. The dataset contains five boundary versions at different resolutions, from full extent to ultra generalised. It is published by the Office for National Statistics and contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Create thematic maps based on county-level administrative boundaries.
• Perform spatial joins for demographic or economic data using the provided boundary files.
• Develop web mapping services using the generalised versions for faster rendering.
• Analyze coastal and offshore administrative extents using the full-resolution realm boundaries.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions for different use cases, from 7 MB full resolution to 73 KB ultra generalised.
• Snapshot is temporally precise, representing boundaries as of 31 December 2016.
• Published by the authoritative Office for National Statistics.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is from 2016; administrative boundaries may have changed since the snapshot date.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries produced by Ordnance Survey and ONS.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2016.

Freshness

Last updated 2026 07 08 13:32:38.390871; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England