I am trying to find the shapefiles for postcode sector and districts in the UK. Specifically inside London. I know I can go and pay for these but I only really need to use them once. I want to generate my own mapping tiles with the shapes on one version of the tiles. Allowing me to show all the postcode boundaries without overloading the JavaScript on the client side.
I could "redraw" some of shapes myself (tracing from others) but would be great if there were some shapefiles already out there.
Can anyone help?
Best Answer
Someone has done it using various royalty and copyright free sources of data - see http://random.dev.openstreetmap.org/postcodes/. In my view the best is the Code-Point Opendata as it comes straight from Royal Mail. I don't think it's quite the same as the actual Royal Mail files but it's probably accurate enough. The files don't seem to be available so you could either contact the author or replicate the process, using the provided source code.
An alternative would be to download the OS OpenData Code-Point and run a tool to create Voroni Polygons on them - this is how the polygons linked are created I think. Most GIS programs should be able to accomplish this task.