Counties (December 2020) EN BFC: England County Administrative Boundaries

Office for National Statistics provides digital vector boundaries for counties in England as of December 2020. The dataset contains full-resolution boundaries clipped to the coastline at the Mean High Water mark. It includes intellectual property rights from both Ordnance Survey and the ONS.

Use Cases

• Mapping county-level administrative regions for England based on the December 2020 boundary definitions.
• Performing spatial joins of socio-economic data to county boundaries for regional analysis.
• Creating base maps for dashboards or reports that require official UK geography.
• Integrating boundary data into GIS workflows via the provided ArcGIS REST and WFS services.

Strengths

• Provides official, authoritative boundaries from the UK's Office for National Statistics and Ordnance Survey.
• Contains full-resolution (BFC) vector data, likely offering high spatial detail.
• Available via multiple access methods including direct download and web feature services (WFS).

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, specific column names, and file size are not provided on any platform.
• The 'last updated' metadata field shows a future date (2026-07-08) on the uk_data platform, conflicting with the eu_open_data date (2023-03-21), indicating potential data quality issues.
• The dataset is static, representing a single snapshot from December 2020, not a time series.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Ordnance Survey

Collection Method

Likely derived from official UK national mapping and statistical geography programs.

Time Range

December 2020

Freshness

2026-07-08 13:33:20.903337 (Note: This future date from uk_data platform conflicts with the 2023 date from eu_open_data.)

Geography

England