Civil Parish and Community Boundaries for England and Wales, December 2016

England and Wales digital vector boundaries for civil parishes and communities as of 31 December 2016. The dataset contains three boundary versions: full resolution extent of the realm, full resolution clipped to the coastline, and a generalised (20m) version. It is provided by the Office for National Statistics and contains both Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Mapping local administrative units based on the provided vector boundaries.
• Analyzing coastal versus inland parish extents based on the clipped and unclipped boundary versions.
• Performing spatial joins with demographic data using the parish/community geography.
• Creating generalised maps for publication using the 20m resolution boundaries.

Strengths

• Provides three specific boundary versions: full extent (114 MB), full clipped (117 MB), and generalised 20m clipped (13 MB).
• Snapshots are temporally precise, representing boundaries as at 31 December 2016.
• Data originates from authoritative sources: the Office for National Statistics and Ordnance Survey.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:16.052131; freshness should be verified as the underlying data is from 2016.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Digital vector boundaries compiled from Ordnance Survey and ONS data.

Time Range

As at 31 December 2016

Freshness

Data represents a 2016 snapshot; metadata was last updated in 2026.

Geography

England and Wales