List of London Postal Districts

When you wear you Blue Badge in London, whether or not you are on duty, sooner or later a passenger or stranded visitor will ask you "Where's London E6", "Where is Walford?" or "Why are the districts numbered apparently so randomly?"  The following explanation and list of codes will hopefully provide you with all the answers!

By the mid-1850's, London had expanded so much that it was divided into ten postal areas, each the equivalent of a separate 'Post Town'.  The central area was divided into east and west (EC and WC) whilst the other 8 were based on the points of the compass but NE was soon combined with E while S was divided between SE and SW to give the 8 prefixes we know today.

London continued to spread at an alarming rate, particularly after the electrification of the railways and Underground, so it became necessary to sub-divide the areas. Numbered suffixes were formalised in 1917 with the '1' district being the closest to the centre (eg SW1 = Westminster & Victoria) thence allocated in alphabetical order of district name. As in the West Country, postal districts are based on the location of sorting offices so the boundaries rarely correspond with Local Authority boundaries.

As London continued to expand at the peripheries, new districts were created with numbers added to the end of the list eg SE19-27 were added when parts of Kent were annexed then, more recently, SE28 was added  to cover the 'new town' of Thamesmead. 

In the 1960's/70's, the Postal District codes became the root part of the current postcodes for London ... without any prefix to indicate that they referred to London at all ! eg N10 2BZ. With postcodes defining but a few houses or even just one office block, it became necessary in the central areas to sub-divide each district with a lettered suffix eg SW1A, SW1B and so on. Some postmen must have degrees in Latin, or be used to carrying much delayed epistles from Rome, as the post for SW1V is often routed via SW4!

  Click on the icon to download the following list in Adobe Acrobat format as a handy single A4 sheet. But there's one district missing from the list : E20. This is Walford, the fictitious location used for the TV 'soap' serial 'Eastenders'.