As excellent a thread as everyone is saying. My Granddad in Norwich was always very proud of having been in the first batch of postcodes, NOR, later changed to NR4, but the old one did keep on working in practice. Also an excellent thread for a less positive reason. https://twitter.com/marcxsmith/status/1358810728619212807

As Marc says, UK postcodes are both excellent and extremely memorable. Which made them completely dominant. And, since this morning we were celebrating a massive Lib Dem in government, it's perhaps time to share a massive Lib Dem failure in government. They privatised them. :'(

Because the UK's postcode system is so good, it's the user experience that we all expect when we input our address to get a service. Taxi picking us up, check our bin day in an app, food delivery, etc... we use postcodes as the entry point of that interaction.

But because they're privatised (specifically [and even this is an outrageous simplification] it's the way the postcode and the address is linked in the way that the privatisation was done) every time you make one of those searches, the provider had to pay for it to be allowed.

Since small companies can't afford the full postcode address file they tend to go via intermediaries, which means that different postcode lookup services give different results at different times. And now there's no shared, agreed, improvable postcode address system for the UK.

Thousands of times every day people type in a postcode to a service, and it doesn't work. And there's not much we can do. It also drives the further centralisation of UK government and tech [I have conspiracy theories about this], since postcode licensing is far cheaper at scale.

The solution is simple. Bite the bullet, admit that postcode privatisation was a mistake, and buy it back. Create something like France's national open address data. Reap the rewards. https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/ 

In advance of the replies, not What.Three.Words. No. Postcodes are loads better for almost all use cases. And latitude and longitude as numbers (transmitted digitally) are loads better for almost all use cases that postcodes aren't better for.