About the Index of Place Names
IPN is a gazetteer linking over 70,000 named places in England and Wales to their respective administrative, health and electoral areas.
It also relates places to registration districts and national parks.
A one metre grid reference is provided and, where the place has legally defined boundaries, a re-aggregated 2001 Census population count.
The places for which information is given include administrative units (ranging from parishes to Regions (Former GORs)), localities and urban areas/subdivisions.
The IPN is issued annually and includes information up to the end of December.
From 1 January 2011 the new GSS Coding and Naming policy for some statistical geographies was implemented.
From this date, where new codes have been allocated they should be used in all exchanges of statistics and published outputs that normally include codes.
The Code History Database (CHD) provides multiple functionality including details of all codes, relationships, hierarchies and archived data.
The 2010 IPN contains the new 9 character coding for all geographies, except localities, settlements, urban areas and urban subdivisions.
Product details
The IPN is an MS Access 2002 file, but is also available as a MS Excel spreadsheet.
The accompanying User Guide provides further details about the product.
Availability and cost
The IPN is available free of charge on CD-ROM - please contact ONS Geography.
