In message
, at
15:10:49 on Sun, 1 Aug 2010, MIG remarked:
On 1 Aug, 12:57, Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at
02:49:26 on Sun, 1 Aug 2010, MIG remarked:

I was particularly pleased to see the 'Romford is/is not in Essex'
argument being brought up immediately in the comments.

Having been brought up in the vicinity, I'd say that all of those were
in Essex, as is [ObLRT:] Upminster and Epping.

This change will finally sort out a couple of villages in the south
Chilterns which are physically in Bucks, but with a Henley (Oxon)
address, and a Reading (Berks) Postcode!

"Physically"?

As in... the county boundary on the map.

All these boundaries are administrative for one purpose
or another. *(Although for some reason people seem to think that past
administrative boundaries are "real" and current ones are not.)

I'm not aware that the Bucks/Oxon border has changed very recently, in
that vicinity (other bits of Oxon border have changed in my lifetime).

The objections to the proposed change seem to come from people who
haven't cottoned on that their postal address is not meant to be a
description of where they live,

"Where you live" does have an effect on services provided by the
relevant councils, and hence on one's lifestyle. Planning and Education,
for example, can vary quite dramatically across a country border.

That may be important, but it may not be reasonable to expect the
Royal Mail to provide the means of deducing it, when they have a more
important responsibility to record delivery points so that they can be
reached efficiently from delivery offices and so on.

It matters because of mission-creep of the PAF, encouraged by the PO,
means that *other* organisations are [mis]using the designations that
were designed for efficient postal delivery in other (potentially
damaging) contexts.

And I'm not sure the PAF is a straight mapping of delivery offices and
addresses any more. Did they really switch from sorting (and sourcing
the local delivery of) Foxton's mail in Cambridge, rather than
Stevenage, when they changed it from an SG to CB postcode?

And anyway, I agree that the provision of things like planning and
education (and who you pay local taxes to) are most important in
determining where an address really "is", but that consideration puts
Romford resolutely in the London Borough of Havering, not Essex.

That's true, but I expect that the Post Office would want to leave off
the "London Borough of Havering" line, if that was what appears in the
PAF today.
--
Roland Perry