UK Data AtlasAPI

List named locations

Named locations are handy groupings the official geographies don't have, like "North Wales" or "Greater Manchester". Search them by name with q.

get
/locations

Good to know

  • They're curated by the Atlas for convenience. They aren't official administrative areas.

Query parameters

  • qstringoptional

    Matches a named location's label, case and punctuation aside. Omit it to list every curated location.

  • asOfstringoptional

    Select the member codes effective on this date. Omit it to return the complete dated definition.

  • cursorstringoptional

    The meta.nextCursor of the previous page. A cursor is opaque and belongs to the query that issued it.

  • limitinteger 1–500optional

    How many records to return, 1 to 500.

    Default100

Returns

object

Named location definitions.

When it goes wrong

  • 503The referenced build artifact has not been built yet.

Every error has the same shape. See Errors for how to handle them.

Technical notes

Show the precise behaviour

A named location is a curated area collection. Most are editorial groupings of area codes (kind: editorial-grouping), kept because people ask for places the official geographies do not name. Countries, English regions, Greater Manchester and some counties are official areas (kind: country, region, combined-authority or county), and all but countries name the ONS lookup their current members come from in source.

The ceremonial counties of England and preserved counties of Wales, which is what most people mean by Lancashire or Kent, are kind: ceremonial-county. No ONS lookup defines them, so source names Ordnance Survey's Boundary-Line polygons and the method: each local authority of every compiled release is a member of the county holding most of its area, and dated by the releases it appears in, so a county keeps the councils it had before a reorganisation. An authority split between counties, as Stockton-on-Tees is between County Durham and North Yorkshire, is a member of the one holding most of it and listed with its share in the other's partialMembers. A county that shares its name with a different official area, as the West Midlands shares the region's, is {id}-ceremonial-county; one with the same councils as an official county is that county. Scotland's lieutenancy areas do not follow council boundaries and are not included.

None is a generic geographic location, and membership holds only through a crosswalk the caller names. q matches an id or label prefix. definitionRevision identifies the curated definition used; validity gives its known bounds, with null bounds when the curator has not supplied dates. memberAssertions gives each member code's half-open effective interval; asOf selects the definition active on one date. Geometry is deliberately omitted from this paginated listing; fetch a selected location's geometry from /v1/locations/{location-id}/geometry.