Boundaries

The OS National Geographic Database (NGD) Boundaries Collection provides a definitive dataset of administrative and electoral boundaries and their names for England, Wales and Scotland. Government Statistical Service (GSS) codes are contained within the data and supplied by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the National Records of Scotland (NRS).

Example image showing what a selection of the feature types in the Boundaries Collection look like in the data. A background map has been included to provide context.

Collection applications

The OS NGD Boundaries Collection allows you to:

• Access a seamless coverage of administrative and electoral boundaries across Great Britain.

• Utilise the key boundaries for Great Britain, which have been designed to be used in multiple applications including GIS and web mapping applications.

• View and interrogate the full hierarchy of boundaries across Great Britain, from 'Parish Or Community' to 'Country'.

• Use GSS codes (where available) to link OS NGD Boundaries Collection polygons with other geographies, helping you perform detailed statistical analysis to better support your decision and policy making.

• Identify areas of sea water and land present within coastal boundary polygons to get a better understanding of the land areas of a boundary.

• Perform powerful analytics, underpinned by unrivalled OS accuracy, using additional enriched attribution (detailed below).

Key elements

• The data is updated twice a year in May and October.

• Plug and play – the data is simple and quick to implement as you don't need to pre-process it before you use it.

• Persistent unique identifiers with lifecycle information.

• New Country Feature Type included, giving polygons for England, Wales and Scotland.

• New Upper and Lower Tier Local Authority Feature Types included, which improve alignment between OS data and ONS data.

• Rich attribution ensures the data is straightforward to navigate and query. The enriched, additional attribution includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • Boundary Parent reference values (where appropriate) to indicate the hierarchy of boundaries (for example, a District Ward will reference the District).

  • Land area, tidal area and total area values in hectares.

  • An isBorough attribute to identify boundaries which are also boroughs.

  • isDetached values are applied to portions of local government and parliamentary constituency areas that are separated from the main area and are completely surrounded by other areas.

Coverage

Great Britain.

Default coordinate reference system

British National Grid (EPSG: 27700).

Temporal filtering

The earliest date on which you can request a one-off snapshot of a date in the past for data in this collection is noted at the top of the individual feature type pages.

Supply formats

GeoPackage, CSV (comma-separated values) or vector tiles.

Supply mechanism

Accessed through the OS Data Hub via:

• OS Select+Build

• OS NGD API – Tiles

It can't be accessed through OS NGD API – Features.

Using our data

Included as part of OS OpenData and therefore can be used for free.