Alfred Ernest Marples, Baron Marples of Wallasey loves postcodes and thinks you should do too.

Ernest Marples
This service has been disabled because of legal action. Please visit the blog for more information. And tell your friends.

What's this all about eh?

Post codes are really useful, but the powers that be keep them closed unless you have loads of money to pay for them. Which makes it hard to build useful websites (and that makes Ernest sad).

So we are setting them free and using them to run PlanningAlerts.com and Jobcentre Pro Plus. We're doing the same as everyone's being doing for years, but just being open about it.

Hopefully the Government and Royal Mail will realise the value of this service and license us to offer it officially, reliably and for free. If not, and this website gets shut down, we'll close the websites we've made that make use of this site's lookup service. Permanently.

Where's the data coming from?

We're not saying. But, just to be clear: we don't hold a copy of the postcode database ourselves, neither in complete form nor as part of a cache.

Who made it or supports it?

This website was built by Harry Metcalfe and Richard Pope, in their capacity as the Directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd.

Ernest who?

He's the Postmaster General who introduced the Postcode.

Documentation?

http://ernestmarples.com/?p=[postcode]&f=[csv|json][&callback=[function]]

The callback parameter is only used if you specify JSON as your output format.

If you plan to use this API in seriousness, please limit your requests to one every couple of seconds, and heed the warning below.

Some helper libraries are available. We haven't checked or tested any of this code so please do so yourself if you're planning to use it.

Many thanks to these marvellous, wonderful people. If you'd like to donate a library for your favourite language, please send it over and we'll add it.

Stay up-to-date

Important: Given the inherent unreliability of using a service like this, it's probably sensible to let us know you're using it so we can hang on to your email and let you know if anything important happens. Hopefully the Royal Mail will be nice, and give us a proper postcode database to use. Then you'll be able to rely on us and this service will become a seamless and transparent part of the web's infrastructure, like it ought to be.

Who's using it?

Here's a list of people who've let us know they're using us for postcode lookup:

Does anyone else think it's a good idea?

Yes! The following people have voiced their support for this project:

If you would like to add your name here, please email us.

Operated by Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd.
Registered in England & Wales No. 6953698. Registered Address: 11 Tufnell Mansions, 73 Anson Road, N7 0AT