Civil Parish Boundaries in England and Wales, December 2016

Digital vector boundaries for civil parishes in England and communities in Wales 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 20m generalised version clipped to the coastline. 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.
• Performing spatial analysis of parish-level data using the coastline-clipped boundaries.
• Creating generalised maps for visualisation using the 20m resolution boundaries.
• Integrating administrative boundaries with other geospatial datasets for England and Wales.

Strengths

• Provides three distinct boundary versions for flexibility in use cases.
• Specific snapshot date of 31 December 2016 for temporal consistency.
• File sizes are explicitly listed, with the generalised version being 13 MB for easier handling.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is from 2016; administrative boundaries may have changed since the snapshot.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics

Collection Method

Likely digitized from official administrative records.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 December 2016.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:06.829682; freshness should be verified.

Geography

England and Wales.