UK Local Authority District Boundaries as of December 2016 in WGS84

December 2016 digital vector boundaries for Local Authority Districts in the UK, provided by the Office for National Statistics. The dataset includes five boundary versions at different resolutions, from full extent to ultra-generalized 500m. It contains Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights and is available via multiple ArcGIS REST services.

Use Cases

• Mapping administrative regions for demographic analysis based on the provided boundary geometries.
• Creating generalized base maps for web applications using the 20m, 200m, or 500m clipped coastline versions.
• Performing spatial joins with other UK datasets using the WGS84 coordinate reference system.
• Analyzing coastal and offshore administrative extents using the full-resolution 'extent of the realm' boundaries.

Strengths

• Provides five distinct boundary versions, including full-resolution (47-50 MB) and generalized (336 KB - 5 MB) options for different use cases.
• Specific snapshot date of 31 December 2016 provides a consistent temporal reference for analysis.
• Contains intellectual property from both Ordnance Survey and the Office for National Statistics, indicating authoritative sourcing.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is a single historical snapshot from 2016; boundaries may have changed for current analysis.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale processing.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries sourced from Ordnance Survey and ONS.

Time Range

As at 31 December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:20.948007; freshness should be verified as the underlying data is from 2016.

Geography

United Kingdom