Yorkshire’s weirdest postcodes from the nonsensical to the minuscule

Postcodes are one of Britain’s greatest inventions.

While they were successfully designed to make deliveries quicker and more efficient, they’ve developed other uses.

Need to find an unfamiliar address using Google Maps or your satnav? Use a postcode.

Read more stories on Yorkshire’s weird history here.

Want to find the nearest coffee shop or council recycling centre? Use your postcode.

Central and local government and public bodies, including the emergency services, use postcodes for administration purposes.

And for the ordinary person in the street, they are a logical way of orientating oneself.

That’s why areas Leeds and Sheffield have part of their postcode on their street name signs.

Sometimes, however, postcodes do not appear logical. They were based on the volumes of post an area would receive when they were devised in the late 1960s.

But looking at some of them you wonder what the Post Office was thinking.

Here are some of Yorkshire’s weirdest or seemingly most illogical postcodes.

BD98

HMRC had its accounts offices in a bizarre hexagonal-shaped complex called The Interchange by the River Aire, at Shipley, which had a BD98 postcode.

Organisations and businesses which have (or had) a large volume of post can have their own outbound code (the first part of the postcode).

The taxman left in September last year during a wave of government office closures across Yorkshire.

HD6

Brighouse is administrated by Calderdale Council from Halifax. The town is equidistant from Halifax and Huddersfield but the HD prefix sticks out like a sore thumb.

LA2

A western chunk of the Yorkshire Dales from Bentham to Gaping Gill has an LA (Lancaster) postcode. The cheek of it.

LS29

Ilkley is not in Leeds and isn’t even within the Leeds City Council area so it’s puzzling that it has an LS prefix.

LS88/LS98

The main Leeds sorting office, off Pontefract Road, Stourton, has its own LS88 prefix because well… it’s the main sorting office.

A stone’s throw away, First Direct bank’s headquarters on Wakefield Road has its own LS98 outbound code.

OL14

Todmorden – entirely in Yorkshire since 1888 – is nowhere near Oldham in Greater Manchester. So why does it have an Oldham prefix? Something to do with the sorting office location?

S10/S11

When it comes to city centre postcodes they’re entirely urban, right? Not S11 which stretches all the way from Sheffield city centre into the Peak District – and outside Yorkshire.

S10 is barely any more logical incorporating a few addresses within the inner ring road – and some of the Peak District.

S80

S80 is Worksop, Nottinghamshire, which is classified as the East Midlands. The postcode covers other bits of Notts, bits of Derbyshire (also East Midlands) and one little village in South Yorkshire (Thorpe Salvin).

WF90

A small number of offices by the River Calder, just outside Wakefield city centre, have this non-geographic postcode, including French fashion retailer La Redoute.

YO90

Large businesses on Wellington Row and Rougier Street in York city centre – such as Aviva – have YO90 postcodes.

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