Great Britain Country Boundaries at December 2016 in Five Generalization Levels

December 2016 digital vector boundaries for Countries in Great Britain, provided by the Office for National Statistics. The dataset contains five versions of the boundaries, from full resolution to ultra-generalized (500m), each clipped to the coastline. It contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Create simplified base maps for national-level visualizations based on the ultra-generalized (500m) boundaries.
• Perform spatial analysis requiring high-precision coastline alignment based on the full resolution clipped boundaries.
• Optimize web map tile rendering performance by selecting the appropriate generalised (20m or 200m) boundary version.

Strengths

• Offers five distinct boundary versions with specific resolutions (full, 20m, 200m, 500m) and file sizes (from 150 KB to 29 MB).
• Contains authoritative intellectual property from both Ordnance Survey and the Office for National Statistics.
• Boundaries are temporally specific, representing the administrative state as of December 2016.

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 analytical joins.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries derived from authoritative sources.

Time Range

December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:31:59.862717; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Great Britain