TL:DR

• If you are interested in linking postcode and constituency, see 2015.04.03.postcode_to_constituency_lookup.tsv.gz in this git repo.
• You can then link constituency with demographic info here

I was impressed by the Democratic Dashboard website recently. You pop in your postcode and it tells you lots of info about your electoral constituency, the demographic make up, as well as the political history.

I was thinking that it would be interesting to link postcode with that kind of information for other purposes, but want an automated way of doing it. Therefore, I took advantage of some of the governments vaunted open data to link between postcode and constituency (I can’t find an existing lookup with this already in). Following a process suggested (but not implemented) here.

First, I downloaded the Office of National Statistics postcode directory (search ONSPD here), which links postcode with [pcon], a code for the parliamentary constituency. Then, I looked up which parliamentary constituency that code refers to using the code history database, also from the stats portal above. Then, I just printed out a list of all the postcodes in the UK (guess how many there are…. 2.5 million!), and the constituency that postcode is in. See this git repo. There is a lot of rows, so you are going to need something better than Excel to analyse it.

The next step is to download the demographic data from Democratic Dashboard and then will have a link from every postcode (actually 2.54 of the 2.56 million, lost a few along the way) to the demographic info for that constituency.

Ok, so it isn’t exactly person-level data (constituencies generally have 50-90 000 people) but if you have a geographically distributed outbreak of Salmonella across lots of difference constituencies, it might help with your hypothesis generation if you can see whether it seems to be affecting more or less affluent areas.