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 variants: full resolution (extent of the realm), full resolution (clipped to coastline), and a generalised (20m) version. It is produced by the Office for National Statistics and contains Ordnance Survey intellectual property.

Use Cases

• Create detailed maps of local administrative units based on the full-resolution boundaries.
• Perform spatial analysis clipped to the coastline using the coastline-clipped boundary files.
• Generate simplified visualisations for web mapping using the 20m generalised boundaries.
• Analyse parish-level geographic extents and their relationship to coastal features based on the Mean High/Low Water marks.

Strengths

• Provides three specific boundary variants (full extent, coastline-clipped, 20m generalised) for different use cases.
• Contains intellectual property from both Ordnance Survey and the Office for National Statistics.
• File sizes are explicitly listed (e.g., 117 MB for full resolution clipped).

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is from December 2016; freshness should be verified for current applications.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:54.783864; the underlying data snapshot is from December 2016.

Geography

England and Wales