What's in a UK address?

Looks like about three cities to me

[MatthewHSE]

I was just looking over an order from a customer in the U.K. I've wondered this before, but this time I just have to ask - what all is included in this address? It looks to me like about three different cities are included. Here's an example of what I'm seeing:

Joe Schmoe
5b Example Avenue
Thistown
Anothercity
Onemoreforgoodmeasure (?!)
AB1 2CD
UK

I'm guessing that one of those "cities" is actually the equivalent of a state, but what do you call it, and what's the third one for?

Your address labels must be a mile tall over there! ;)

[Alternative Future]

Hi MatthewHSE,

Your example is quite close to where I stay hehe

Name
Street Address
Part of City = Bridge of Don
City = Aberdeen
Shire = Aberdeenshire or Aberdeen for the actual city of Aberdeen

The equilvalent to a state is a shire or county in old church records I think these are quite obsolete now here is the wiki ref en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counties_of_Scotland

HTH,

-Gs

[edited by: Alternative_Future at 4:51 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2007]

[ectect]

I would say that is

Joe Schmoe
5b Example Avenue
Verysmallvillage
Biggerlocaltown (just for good measure)
County (State)
AB1 2CD
UK

[jecasc]

Haha. That funny. I am always wondering this myself when I have a shipment to the UK.

I think one is county. However you are lucky that you have a street and house number. Sometimes this is even missing and it's just the name of a house. Make sure you get a phone number for the parcel service from those. Since this is usually some estate lonely in the country miles away from the next village or you will have to ship the package twice or even three times until it gets there.

Shipments to Spain are also funny. It seems every woman has at least 5 first names: It's always Carmen Mercedes Patricia Elena Consuela Alvarez de Barcelona or something.

[creative craig]

5b Example Avenue would mean that he might live in a flat... some times the landlords divide one floor to make two apartments so there would be an A and B

You dont normally need to include the part of the city as the name of the road and the post code would be more than enough to locate the house.

[Dabrowski]

ectect is right, it's usually town, city, county, or village, town, county, whichever fits best for where the user lives.

Counties are things like Worcestershire, Leicestershire, Loughboroughshire, etc....

[topr8]

i was researching formatting addresses for various countries in order to automate our label printing correctly and came across this site:

[bitboost.com...]

its pretty definative!

[edited by: lawman at 6:31 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2007]