About this project

Postcode Wars is a personal project built by a husband and wife. We run it in our spare time and pay for the infrastructure ourselves, so we keep the scope small on purpose: costs grow with scale, and we would rather do a small area well than the whole UK poorly.

Why the limited scope?

We currently cover London and the commuter belt: 98 local authority districts across Greater London, Surrey, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and West and East Sussex. That works out to around 2,400 areas. We picked this footprint because roughly 75% of the "where should I live" questions we looked at online were about London and the surrounding area, and because expanding takes real maintenance time and money (more data storage, more bandwidth, more compute).

Each area on the site is one ONS electoral ward. Wards are community boundaries drawn by the Boundary Commission, which makes them a more honest unit than a postcode sector. A postcode block is just a Royal Mail delivery convenience, a ward is an actual place with an identity.

If the project is useful to you and you want to help us expand the coverage, you can buy us a coffee.

AI-assisted content

Not everything on the site comes from the open government data. Some qualitative content (for example, area character descriptions and editorial labels) was generated or refined with the help of large language models working from their real-world knowledge. Generation is led by Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6, with review passes by OpenAI GPT 5.3 and GLM 5.1, all of which were exposed to the open government data to interpret. Content is checked for plausibility but may be wrong or out of date. The statistical scores and rankings stay anchored in the government sources.

Data sources

Postcode Wars ranks areas using publicly available government data from the Department for Education, Ofsted, HM Land Registry, Office for National Statistics, UK Police, Ordnance Survey, and the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

We try to keep data current and reflective of the most recent publications. There may be short periods between source updates where this is not the case.