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The server is currently churning through the latest house price data from the Land Registry. The trend continues, the number of sales is falling and prices are dropping with the annual percentage change likely to turn negative next month. The rise in interest rates finally seems to be having an effect.

I was complaining recently about the poor state of UPRN data. But it turns out I was mostly wrong and the problem was my poor research abilities (or things have changed for the better recently). A Disqus conversation led me to this page which provides the links between different identifiers.

These are all CSV files that can be imported into your favourite database. To get the street name of a UPRN, we need to download the UPRN -> USRN links file. Once we've got the USRN, we need to download the Road TOID -> USRN links file. Once we've got the TOID, we can link to the street name using the OS Open Names download (it's probably also possible to do this using the OS Open Roads download but that's a bit more difficult to process).

We're still not able to construct an open version of PAF but we are slowly creeping closer towards that. 

So I've pulled all that data into this site and started displaying it in a couple of places (like here and here) but I'm keen to hear suggestions for other potential uses for this data e.g. all the roads in a postcode area/district/sector, all the postcodes for a road. 

One thing to note. The OS provides a UPRN dataset and the ONS also provides a UPRN dataset. The OS version doesn't include postcodes but the ONS version does so is likely to be somewhat more useful.

Update - I'm not convinced the data provided in the linked identifiers is completely accurate. I noticed some strange results for some roads, so tried re-importing using the RoadLink TOID rather than the USRN (there's a useful diagram in this document that shows how everything links together). That gave better results but still not entirely accurate, this postcode shows two properties on the wrong street. I guess it's better than nothing but you're probably still better off purchasing PAF currently

I've uploaded the latest house price data for England and Wales to the website

Prices are heading down but the annual change remains in positive territory.

This seems like a big milestone. Electricity produced by renewables in the UK in 2023 is higher than electricity produced by fossil fuels. Hopefully the wind will continue to blow for the rest of the year and keep it that way. Source

I finally got round to importing schools data for England and Wales. I've not done a lot with it other than list nearby schools for individual postcodes. Let me know how you'd like to visualise or download the data.

One interesting thing I found in the schools data is the inclusion of the UPRN of the school. OK, it's interesting to me, possibly not to many other people. UPRNs uniquely identify addressable properties in Britain but although the data is freely available, it doesn't include the associated addresses. So it's kind of useless. I presume the reason we can't get the addresses is because the Royal Mail and its resellers make money from selling this data as PAF and if we could get a list of UPRNs and their addresses, PAF would be redundant. But this means no-one has much interest in UPRNs, because they don't serve any purpose for humans. 

We could try and build our own open source UPRN/address database, which is sort of happening at OSM. Run the query

node
  [ "ref:GB:uprn"]
  ["addr:street"]
  ({{bbox}});
out;

This currently doesn't return a huge amount of data and populating it is kind of difficult legally. I can find out my UPRN on Find My Address, but can I then use that to help populate OSM? Probably not, since the address data isn't open data. 

The government says we should be using UPRNs

"Systems, services and applications that store or publish data sets containing property and street information must use the UPRN and USRN identifiers."

But if everybody did this, all open property data would only include the UPRN and no address, which would make that data fairly unhelpful for humans. May I make the bold suggestion that it's time to make all this data open?

I've updated the Land Registry data on the website. The annual change is still in positive territory but prices look to be starting to head downwards. Taking into account inflation and wage increases, house prices are falling, but given the increases in mortgage costs, affordability is probably not

Before this summer, climate change had always seemed a rather abstract concept. I knew it was happening and I knew we had to do something about it, but it appeared to be a gradual process that would take decades to play out.

Then large parts of the world started burning. And other places were suffering from catastrophic flooding. As I read about these disasters, the algorithms decided to show me even more related stuff, like the graphs of sea and land temperatures and the climate records being broken on a daily basis and the future started to look increasingly dark.

I went in search of positive climate news and the increasing use of EVs along with the increasing use of renewables to generate electricity gave me some hope for the future. This post gave me the idea of automating the calculation of the equivalent MPG of an EV. I liked this comparison since we are all familiar with the MPG for a fossil fuel car. So here you can calculate the equivalent MPG in terms of emissions and also cost.

Plugging in some numbers for the UK suggested owning an EV is a good thing for the environment and for your pocket. Even for the dirtiest countries (I'm looking at you Poland), running an EV is probably equivalent to running a fossil fuel car and will only get better as we transition to cleaner sources of energy. Of course, not using a car for journeys is an even better option 

Another month goes by and the world may be on fire but house prices keep going up

I've uploaded the latest UK postcode data to the website. Sanity checks suggest everything is OK, but let me know if something looks wrong

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