"Steve Fitzgerald" ] wrote in message
...
In message , Peter Masson
writes
There is also a good practical reason for including the unnecessary county
in a postal address. Letters addressed to
CHISLEHURST
BR7 5xx
have not infrequently arrived late with a spurious Bristol postmark. This
does't seem to happen when they are addressed
CHISLEHURST Kent
BR7 5xx

There are also cases where two post towns in different parts of the
country share a name (Ashford, Richmond, etc). While the correct postcode
does differentiate, inclusion of the county name does reduce the risk of
misrouting.

Bearing in mind that the routing is done electronically by 'outbound
postcode' only, ie. the first portion, BR7 in your example, I fail to see
how adding the county can have any effect on this at all as it's not even
read by the system.

If the electronic reader fails to register the postcode (especially if the
address is handwritten) and the item is rejected for manual sorting, it is
only too easy for the Mk1 human eyeball to misread BR7 5xx as Bristol.

Peter