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What is the minimal possible UK address?

by vladharbuz on 3/2/23, 1:27 PM with 391 comments

by rax0m on 3/2/23, 3:47 PM
Olga was a famous doorkeeper at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
Students used to send her postcards from their journeys.
It became so popular that it was enough to write "Olga, Sweden" for her to get the letters [0] (source in swedish).
[0]: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Boberg

by seanhunter on 3/2/23, 3:48 PM

Some brilliant examples of postal detective work in Ireland documented here https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-mail-in-Ireland-with-the-....

   Petra Kindler and Donal Moore
   Unfortunately I forgot the street name
   but it's near a street named *Cul de Sac*
   The beautiful city of Waterford,
   well known for its kindly postmen
   IRELAND

by jrochkind1 on 3/2/23, 3:41 PM
In the US, someone I know who had a Post Office box liked writing simply `box-number zip-code` as their address.
It worked. Eg, if you wrote on an envelope:
```
    1034
    21240
```
It would get there! You might want to add a "Box" before the "1034" to be safe -- and to disambiguate between a house number, as in OP? (I'm not sure just a house number would ever work in the USA?)
But it looks cooler with just two numbers. Especially it did 20 years ago when my friend did it. Very futuristic cyberpunk. Maybe a square glyph for "box" would be good.
by djm_ on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
I remember working with SagePay as a payment provider back in 2008 (before we knew of Stripe!) and finding it interesting that card address validation was only done on the numbers in a full address.
For example, from "20 Windsor Road, London, SE1 6JH" it would extract 2016 and validate that against the banks details.
I thought that was quite a smart way as UK addresses can come in all forms, shapes and sizes (as the post shows) – but the minimal bits required to be correct are indeed the numbers as all postcodes have them and an incorrect number would mean a incorrect postcode.
Edit: the funny bit was that they made you work this out and send it along with the request rather than just handling it internally :)
by robga on 3/2/23, 4:19 PM
They can be shorter.
"I am sure some postcodes only contain one house number, in which case you could use just the postcode as your address, which would be quite cool. "
Indeed.
There are 55,540 full postcodes in England and Wales that contain only one household.
This would mean you could just send the letter to the postcode itself.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
by mastax on 3/2/23, 4:00 PM
I remember CGP Grey talked about staying with his wife's family in rural Hawaii, on his Cortex podcast. His address included something like "take a left at the big tree".
The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
So he would see packages slowly make their way to his island, then be marked as undeliverable, then slowly make their way back. Eventually Amazon stopped allowing him to ship packages at all.
by sequoia on 3/2/23, 6:30 PM
This is a fantastic post & I love mail art and experimenting with the mail. One thing I learned in the USA is that while a card can be 3x5 (LxW) it cannot be 5x3 (i.e. oriented in "portrait") because the machines aren't set up to read it that way. However, you can add $.20 in additional postage and write "No machine" so they hand-cancel the stamp rather than using the machine. This is useful for any time you don't want them running the letter through the cancelling machine.
At the risk of opening myself up to having postal workers kick in my door and charge me with a federal crime: one experiment I tried was to stamp a postcard addressed to me, cover the address with a card with my friends address on it, shrink-wrapping it and sending it to them. The stamp does not get canceled because of the plastic wrap & the reply can travel back to me on the same stamp. (basically: "yes you can cover a stamp with plastic to avoid cancellation then reuse it.")
One nit I'd pick with the author here is that the address style he uses does not adequately route the letter to him. He states that all the mail in his building goes into one box, so if this were not something he was expecting and it arrived for him, there would be no way to route it to the correct person once it reached the building. I suppose in the more general case, assuming a single family household, this method would work. Cool post in any event!
by HarHarVeryFunny on 3/2/23, 3:57 PM
I'm sure it depends a bit on the delivery and sorting offices involved. The UK (I'm an ex-pat) seems to be WAY better than the US at this - it seems they really want to deliver the mail and make an effort to do so, vs here in the US where it's almost the opposite - like they are looking for any excuse NOT to deliver. I had one returned to sender since the post office wouldn't figure the missing town from the zip code!
I've read stories of letters to rural areas in UK where "so & so, sheepstown" is enough to get it delivered since the carrier knew who so & so was. As a kid in the UK I remember once asking for a refund on a can of hot-dogs that was one short, by sending a note on a greasy chinese take-out lid without even adding a stamp to it. The post office delivered it, and I got my refund!
by jakewins on 3/2/23, 1:51 PM
Clearing out some old stuff from my grandparents, grandpa had at some point received a letter, from Stockholm, to their summer house in the woods addressed
```
    Thorvald
    The forest by <tiny village in Sweden>
```
by skrebbel on 3/2/23, 4:57 PM
This works in the Netherlands too, and people commonly use the format for writing the sender address on the back of the envelope.
Eg if you live on Braamstraat 11, 5614LK Eindhoven, you can write “5614LK 11” as the return-to-sender address and it’ll work. Post codes here are always \d{4}[A-Z]{2} so it’s obvious to anyone (incl the address scan computers) where the postcode ends and the house number starts.
If you mail internationally you can write “NL-5614LK 11” and it’ll also work.
by rootusrootus on 3/2/23, 4:55 PM
In the US, you can check the address database directly to see what the minimum required elements are that resolve to your address [0]. This is what the USPS does when you mail something, they match to this database and then print a delivery barcode along the bottom of the letter.
Worth noting is that the delivery barcode is all that really matters. If you write 'return to sender' on an envelope and change nothing else, then throw it in the post box, you're going to get it sent right back to you. Always take a marker and block out that barcode and enough of your original address so that it gets forced to a human.
[0] https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress
by m-i-l on 3/2/23, 4:21 PM
I always try to maximise postal information rather than minimise, to reduce chance of error, given in my case I have many opportunities for people to make mistakes, e.g.:
- I have someone with the same first name and same last name at the same house number on the adjacent street.
- There is another street with the same name in the same city (although it is a different postcode).
- There was someone with the same surname and first initial in another flat in my block.
On that last point, it has been a particular bone of contention that the Post Office insist on identical postal addresses in their Postcode Address File (PAF) for different flats which share the same letter box. I always specify my flat number where I can to ensure I am uniquely identified (which is important for identity documents, financial information, insurance etc.), but in systems which use the PAF with no manual override I can't, which has led to all sorts of issues over the years, e.g.
- Unable to transfer an ISA because my old and new details didn't match.
- Had a former neighbour successfully set up a postal redirect for all flats in the block not just their own, meaning all my post, including bills, bank statements, a renewed driving licence which I happened to apply for at the time, basically everything you'd need for comprehensive identity theft, was redirected to someone else for several months with no-one able to do anything about it.
Apparently the only (absurd) workaround to get a unique entry in the PAF would be to physically install another letterbox in the same door (leading to the same floor).
by udev on 3/2/23, 5:18 PM
In Canada, kids can write letters to:
Santa
H0H0H0
which is valid postal code, and used to be processed by volunteers around Christmas time.
I suspect you can just write H0H0H0 and it will work.
by tetris11 on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
At risk of sounding like a sourpuss, I can't help but think that this is something that most people who live in the UK work out simply by using web forms which autocomplete your address based on simply postcode and number.
by aisio on 3/2/23, 1:59 PM
In Ireland you can just describe the person instead of the actual address and it'll get delivered
https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
by uberman on 3/2/23, 1:37 PM
semi related - Address as a hand drawn maps:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/with-no-a...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del...
by simonjgreen on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
Reminds me of this wonderful post, primarily UK oriented. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
by passion__desire on 3/2/23, 4:10 PM
It’s interesting to see that the senders of these letters and postcards have not written Gandhi’s postal address. Since Gandhi was always travelling and campaigning all over the country; often people did not know his exact postal address and many letters were addressed to "Gandhiji, jahan ho wahan (meaning wherever he is)". [0]
[0] https://zikredilli.com/delhi-depository/f/to-gandhi-wherever...
by kraftman on 3/2/23, 3:49 PM
There was a guy a few years ago who wrote addresses as puzzles and they got delivered: https://metro.co.uk/2014/07/17/prankster-writes-puzzles-inst...
by Laaas on 3/2/23, 4:52 PM
In Japan, most addresses can be fully identified without any street or city names, not unlike what's described in this article.
As an example, this is an address I found using Google Maps:
〒223-0007 1-14-12
If you have an apartment number, you can append it with another -, e.g. 1-14-12-201.
Written "properly", you would not use dashes, but instead suffix each number with a kanji (except for the post code).
Written properly, it would be:
〒233-0007 神奈川県横浜市港南区大久保１丁目１４番１２号、２０１号室
The place on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/bDSFp1U1PNtBpUad6
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
by hprotagonist on 3/2/23, 1:58 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-35174646
"ENGLAND" seems sufficient!
by madcaptenor on 3/2/23, 3:42 PM
In the US I wonder if something like "6 W 8, NY NY" would work. Google Maps can find it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/6+W+8th+St,+New+York,+NY+1...
by theginger on 3/2/23, 4:41 PM
If you write to the DVLA (driver and vehicle licensing agency) they have various individual postcodes for different departments Eg SA99 1AR is vehicle customer services The whole of SA99 I'd dedicated to the DVLA, so simply SA99 on an envelope would probably get there, although written just DVLA would probably do that same.
by BasedInfra on 3/2/23, 1:49 PM
You can put just ‘HMRC’ (UK tax department) on a letter (with paid postage) and it will get to them.
by rtpg on 3/2/23, 1:51 PM
Definitely not unique to Japan, but several towers here have their own zip code, and there is at least one building I know where the building has several zip codes (each for various floors of the building).
People take this and extrapolate to think that we should just be writing very long zip codes for everything, but the wonderful nature of writing out addresses is that they have a lot of possible error correcting. The one thing that is still pretty haphazard is the street number, let's get some ECC checks in there!
by avalore on 3/2/23, 5:01 PM
A friend of mine dropped out of university and went to live the "ski-bum" lifestyle in France. His mum wasn't happy with this and eventually took to writing letters to him addressed "Joe and his stupid friends, Chamonix". They all arrived without issues.
This was in the early 90's. I wonder how effective this would be now with more automated systems in use.
by showerst on 3/2/23, 3:56 PM
In the US, there are a number of buildings with their own zip code, but you can do a little better. The president has 20500-0001 reserved, but even he loses out to someone more important: Smokey the bear is the only resident of 20252 =).
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2014/07/01/letters-smokey-be...
Now I want to send him a postcard to just the ZIP and see if it makes it!
by micromacrofoot on 3/2/23, 2:13 PM
Reminds me that https://what3words.com/ exists, it's too bad a system like this couldn't be implemented globally. I'd love to write ///rich.soup.noble on an envelope and have it delivered
by dmurray on 3/2/23, 1:56 PM
It looks like it went through the automated letter sorter, too (see the orange barcode that's been added to the envelope). Not surprising as the address is even more unambiguous to a machine than a human.
Occasionally there are viral stories here of letters being addressed to places like "The blue house, Termonfeckin, Ireland", which looks like it conveys less information even if it's physically longer. These get manually sorted, though.
by sprabbage on 3/2/23, 9:43 PM
(note: this may no longer be true - I learned this in the late 90s, and my recollection is slightly fuzzy, so take the details with a pinch of salt).
Royal Mail postcodes that people commonly use may be augmented with a so-called Delivery Point Suffix (DPS), that is an extension of the postcode that identifies a unique delivery address.
The DPS is an alphanumeric code like "1A". As such it is likely shorter than the decimal property number, and does not waste characters on things like "flat 2".
I think a postcode plus DPS should be sufficient to get a letter to a specific address.
High volume bulk mailers can qualify for discounts if they use the DPS, and apply sorting to bag up mail based on destination sorting office and the like.
Sometimes you can see the DPS printed after the postcode on your bills if you get mail from a company that has huge mail volumes.
I learned all this when I re-wrote a god-awful bulk mail sorting program called qamsort (Quick Address Mailsort) for a mobile Telco billing department. Back then Royal Mail used to give away the data needed to do the sorting. Took me a week of lunchtimes, written in Perl, ran in a fraction of the time of qamsort, and didn't cause monthly callouts at 2a.m. because of bullshit license key file expiry.
Never got used in production because people were too change averse and my boss didn't think we could sell it for enough to be worth taking on the risk, which turned out to be the right decision because Royal Mail started charging a pretty penny for access to the sorting data not long thereafter.
I was very excited to learn Perl back then. Fun times.
by donatj on 3/2/23, 4:59 PM
My dad talks about how durring the Vietnam War his friend who was kind of slow got drafted and would send him letters addressed to "Dennis by the swap in Eden Prairie" and they'd somehow actually get delivered.
by bloak on 3/2/23, 1:37 PM
He should have written
```
  20
  SE1 6AD
  GB
```
and posted it in a different country.
by Nextgrid on 3/2/23, 1:54 PM
I wonder if there are performance differences/overheads between the address styles?
Maybe automated sorting machines use redundant information for OCR error-correction, and omitting it might kick the letter into a fallback "manual processing" queue as the automation has no way of checking the validity of its guess?
by ricardobayes on 3/2/23, 6:04 PM
Living in Spain I really learned to appreciate a well-working postal service which is ultimately a small, but meaningful factor in quality of life. That said, the postal services are generally pretty good in Spain, but there's a big problem of addresses, and the very outdated databases that were true at one point, but someone since re-named the street two-three times already (or just made up a street name to get some process going, like to connect the electricity when the final street name wasn't given yet). Lots of houses have one official address (on the deed), one (or three) address that everyone knows it by. The street signs and even the house numbers are wrong sometimes. Our house currently has no less than five addresses, used with various providers.
by TuringNYC on 3/2/23, 4:05 PM
Loved your article!
>> I wrote myself a letter, headed to the nearest postbox, and posted it. >> A couple of days later, I was very happy to find this in my postbox!
To make this more robust, i'd try this exercise 10-20 times. Different dates (to test for driver). Different sources (to test for source PO)
by nathell on 3/2/23, 1:56 PM
Postcodes in Poland are much less granular than the UK ones, but you can still get by in more rural areas on the assumption of local postmen knowing the people. My parents used to routinely successfully receive letters addressed just
<my parents’ names> <town name>
where the town has circa 3K inhabitants.
by dhosek on 3/2/23, 6:20 PM
Most (all?) P.O. Boxes in the US have unique zip+4 addresses so you should, in theory, be able to send a letter to:
12345-6789
(assuming that actually corresponded to a P.O. Box) and have it delivered.
With automation, you might even be able to just put the bar code for a letter on the envelope and have it delivered. I say this based on the fact that I used to stamp mail for previous inhabitants with a not at this address and black out the address (but not the bar code), dump it in the mailbox and then have it show up in the email I get daily from the post office showing the day’s mail (fortunately, the human step of delivery usually pulled those letters out of the process).
by pshirshov on 3/2/23, 1:50 PM
In Ireland it's just XXX XXXX (each property gets assigned with a unique EirCode)
by petercooper on 3/2/23, 2:00 PM
Back in the 80s/90s I recall my parents getting carried away with a fad of marking valuable personal objects with house number and postcode (in the same fashion as in this post) so they could be identified if stolen. Apparently it's still a thing – https://www.immobilise.com/ – but I haven't personally heard about anyone doing it in decades.
In my building, mail for all flats gets delivered to the same postbox, so we don’t need the flat part.
You do if you don't want one of the other residents taking and opening it instead..(!) ;-)
by YoooThere on 3/2/23, 1:59 PM
This reminds me of the Derek & Clive sketch where a letter of complaint is addressed to the Director General of the BBC:
C**, London
by jlarcombe on 3/2/23, 4:01 PM
Apsley House famously has (or had?) the address "Number 1, London".
by losvedir on 3/2/23, 6:28 PM
I grew up in a small town with a population of about 2,000. I remember one time I signed up for a website with my real name and city, but didn't want to give my home address so just made up "123 Main St" (my town doesn't have a "Main St"). Sure enough, they sent a spam postcard, addressed to my name @ 123 Main St. The post office, being friendly and knowing who all the residents are, still delivered it to my home, alas...
by bstpierre on 3/2/23, 1:57 PM
I once got USPS mail addressed to:
My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State
no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.
by bombcar on 3/2/23, 1:36 PM
I think he implied it but there are postal codes that refer to a single Mail Drop location.
For example, sometimes your tax return will have its own zip code in the USA.
by mannykannot on 3/2/23, 2:04 PM
Technically, an occupant of flat 1 could have rationally concluded that it was addressed to them as much as it was to anyone else in the building.
by preinheimer on 3/2/23, 1:54 PM
Years ago I was told that in Canada house number + postal code was sufficiently unique to deliver mail. This made sense to me in a design, it drastically cuts the amount of information that needs to be read off the envelope.
Then I bought a house that shares a postal code and number with a house on the street behind.
It’s had me wondering what the minimum viable address for any address in the country would be.
by willyt on 3/2/23, 2:06 PM
I had a friend who was a farmer in a rural part of Britain and you could send him a letter by just writing First Name, Last Name, County and he would get the letter as his family had been farming that land for hundreds of years and the postal service could figure it out somehow.
I also remember an art project where they put the address in the form of various different kinds of puzzles and had letters successfully delivered.
I think there's some kind of ancient law that the postal service has to try everything possible to find out how to deliver a letter. I suspect that there is a legal aspect to this as well because I was told once that if you send someone a legal notice in Britain by Royal Mail, saying, e.g. 'You have 28 days to comply blah blah' the key date is the date it was posted, not the date it was received, unless the recipient can prove they received it late, not sure if that is still true since the post office was privatised.
by cryvate1284 on 3/2/23, 1:55 PM
In terms of buildings/mail unit, an example of a post code in the UK would be CB2 1TQ which is for Trinity College.
by Archelaos on 3/2/23, 2:25 PM
I wonder what is the shortest adress that works in Germany. Central Mannheim has streets (or rather squares) which are identified by a combination of a single letter and a single digit. This is then followed by the number of the house. But sometimes a building occupies a whole square. So for example
```
    E5 
    68159 Mannheim
```
is the address of the city hall.
One should get away with using the number plate abbriviation "MA" for "Mannheim". So something like
```
    H5
    68159 MA
```
should work too. And since the zip code identifies the city
```
    H5
    68159 
```
might work as well.
And perhaps even
```
   H5
   MA
```
or simply
```
   H5
```
if you post the letter in Mannheim itself.
Another possibility for short addresses is that some companies or agencies in Germany have their own postal code. So just writing their five-digit-code on the envelope should suffice.
by Daviey on 3/3/23, 12:15 PM
I once ordered something and wrongly selected the country next to mine on a drop down "Uganda" rather than "United Kingdom". The letter was sent from the UK, and eventually arrived to me ~2 months late stamped with "miss-routed to Uganda".
by fennecfoxy on 3/3/23, 12:16 PM
Yes, this is one thing I love about the UK compared to NZ.
My first postcode here pointed right to the apartment building I was in, so it was essentially: 9, WXXXX.
Now my postcode points to the group of flat buildings I'm in and is now 8, NXXXXX.
Obviously things get a tiny bit looser as you leave less populated/central areas but it's still a really neat system, but as per usual it's corrupted by UK's history, things being added in etc and it's not based on any sort of co-ordinates beyond compass/regions.
Would be amazing to see a grid based co-ordinate system that could be adopted as an international standard over time. Then again it does lose the character of the full address/street name (which is something important to people from the UK).
by bfirsh on 3/2/23, 4:51 PM
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this: https://www.meversusanpost.com/
Somebody who does this for fun, normally with some kind of puzzle that needs solving to get the address.
by supernova87a on 3/2/23, 6:06 PM
Does anyone remember in old-timey puzzle books that you might have read as a kid, the example puzzles (maybe fictional) of how the British postal service would decode people's addresses expressed in rebus form?
Like:
HILL
----
MIKE
----
WOOD
They would say the post office cleverly got it delivered to Mike Underhill, Overwood UK.
I guess that was for a more leisurely, less efficient time.
by jmclnx on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
Interesting, I tried something similar here in the US by using an address like this:
1 my street
01234-5678
But the letter was returned to me as "Address Unknown". It needed the City and State to be delivered. Nice to see in the UK the postal codes are more useful then here in the US.
by Kwpolska on 3/2/23, 8:52 PM
> unlike countries where a postcode represents an entire neighbourhood
¿Porqué no los dos? The largest cities in Poland have thousands of postcodes, some of them have ~one street per postcode (or sometimes a smaller part of it), so many postcodes have less than a thousand distinct mailboxes, and you can probably find postcodes assigned to a single building (that were not paid for or granted to a specific institution). And then you get to cities with around 200k inhabitants* and there is one postcode that covers the entire city, plus a few nearby villages.
* Toruń. (This previously said 120k and Gorzów Wielkopolski, but I found a larger city.)
by corobo on 3/2/23, 2:00 PM
You can also register aliases somehow.
If you need to send something (cheques etc) to Monzo bank I'm pretty sure you can just write "Monzo" on the envelope. No stamp needed.
Pretty sure = it worked like 6 years ago when I last encountered a cheque.
by quitit on 3/2/23, 5:59 PM
I can't claim to be this clever, but I do remember a friend telling me at least two decades ago that all he gives the taxi is the postcode + house number.
Seems this is also not some special knowledge as all of his friends did the same.
by Scoundreller on 3/2/23, 3:39 PM
Once lived in a Canadian house that had its own postal code.
Was always careful with any system that showed you the closest stores or whatever by postal code.
I think I only tried to send one envelope with just the postal code and it didn’t make it!
by 6c696e7578 on 3/2/23, 6:01 PM
Quite a few online forms do this already, you only need to put in the postcode then you are presented with a selection of house numbers.
Often we put the house number and postcode on the back of the envelope as a sender address.
by brnt on 3/2/23, 1:51 PM
In the Netherlands you can do something similar. Postal code + house number is unique for a box (there can be no multiple boxes at a single house number), and all other info is optional.
So, a full address could be: 1540 AB 1.
by jen20 on 3/2/23, 2:05 PM
Royal Mail used to be (perhaps still are!) spectacularly good at delivering improperly addressed mail. I once got mail addressed to "house on the corner opposite the pub, <village name>".
by jum4 on 3/4/23, 5:40 AM
Very entertaining post and comments. :)
Big old fashion corporation had sometime build up their on internal postal system. Sometimes the try to reinvent the wheel instead of just reading about the estiablished postal system and get the best out of it.
One time I worked in such a big corporation and I have written internal letters to the CEO during business trips to other locations with a big "Thank You Postal Office Operations Team" on the enevlope to increase their visibility.
by burnt-croissant on 3/2/23, 10:36 PM
I think this is commonly known due to address finders online for shopping etc. providing autofill based on these two items.
However, I would be more interested to understand how the address is used by the postman delivering the mail.
If you have just a post code, do they have to look up the street name (how?) or is it already pre-organised for them so they know that stack/bag X of letters all corresponds to street Y and so they only really need to look at the door number?
by rogy on 3/2/23, 3:52 PM
I live in London too, but I really don't think this would work well for most things, Royal Mail, sure. But if I give a this to a private parcel company, theres no way they are going to figure out that, despite being the only #9 in my postcode, there are 3 streets that my postcode covers, google maps doesn't locate my house specicically if I put "9 <postcode>', it will absolutely be marked as could not locate.
by jmfldn on 3/2/23, 4:47 PM
A postcode and house number is all that's needed in theory in the UK, so something like `2 A12 1XY`. In reality that would be weird and people would add the street and town.
One issue also is that, even though the postcode pinpoints a small group of houses, it might happen to span two streets. It also gets complicated with flats and any number of other corner cases.
Addresses are complicated as anyone who has had to deal with them in code will testify.
by _a_a_a_ on 3/2/23, 6:33 PM
I remember something from a long time ago, very pre-Internet. Just checked and I found it easily enough. I would consider it apocryphal, but anyway, an address of
```
   Wood,

   John,

   Hants.
```
Was interpreted as
```
   John Underwood,

   Andover,

   Hants. 
```
And it was claimed, eventually directly delivered. Supposedly
Edit: that and a few more, including (if true) and incredible address of just
```
   C B N B
```
by unglaublich on 3/2/23, 7:01 PM
Netherlands: each street has a unique postal code and number. So your unique address would be something like `2800AA 2`. Or `8440HK 14a`.
by domh on 3/2/23, 5:03 PM
I was actually thinking about this recently and came to the same conclusion. Postcodes are normally for 1 street only, so the house number + postcode are the only things required. Normally when giving my address I give the road name too, just so online mapping services function properly. Typing "20 SE1 6AD" into google maps doesn't work.
by knodi123 on 3/2/23, 7:19 PM
As a conversation topic in our engineering team recently, we discussed what the shortest possible message you could send to pinpoint as specific a position on earth, unambiguously, in as few possible characters, in plain readable non-coded language.
Like "top of the great pyramid", for example, looks like it is a 200 sq ft area, in 25 characters of message.
by varenc on 3/3/23, 1:46 AM
In the US several federal institution have their own zipcodes, no box number required. So they might win the "shortest address" competition on this side of the pond.
For example: 20500 just goes straight to the Whitehouse, 20501 to the Vice President, 20511 to the Director of Intelligence, 20555 is the nuclear regulatory commission, etc.
by ryanmcdonough on 3/2/23, 1:52 PM
Well it's all going to a central place in the flats, so without a specification on which flat how do we know which flat the letter belongs to - works well with a house you own but the minimalism could mean your post being inadvertently taken.
However it's a good show of how much ink/time is wasted normally on letters with useless data.
by HL33tibCe7 on 3/2/23, 5:24 PM
See also:
* https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
* https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/amp/How-Roy...
* https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-postman-miraculously-de... (and the three other stories linked within!!)
* https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67207/letter-no-address-...
* https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del... (possibly my favourite)
Good old posties
by andix on 3/2/23, 3:55 PM
Austria can top this, there are towns without street names, so the shortest address you could have for example would be (in this example the number is 0, to not post a real address here)
5222 Ach 0
(Which translates to the town of Ach in the ZIP code 5222, and house number 0)
If you write it like this it may be even an international valid address (for some countries)
A-5222 Ach 0
by naturalauction on 3/2/23, 1:55 PM
I know that many constituent colleges at the University of Cambridge are the only address in their post code. For example, Trinity College is CB2 1TQ.
However, hundreds of people live in each college (they just have large mailrooms), so on a practical level you’d likely need to put your name down if you wanted to get mail.
by ajb on 3/2/23, 4:43 PM
Something I always mean to try, is to put an address on a webserver and the URL on the envelope, and see if the "address detective" dept would dereference it.
I'm sure it would take longer as it would have to go via the exception case; but if enough people then did it they would have to automate it.
by rahimnathwani on 3/2/23, 3:47 PM
When I was a kid I had a classmate mail me a letter with only my name and postcode, i.e. going even further than OP, by omitting the house number.
The letter arrived a day or two later, and I brought it to school, to his surprise.
The trick? There are only 2 addresses with that postcode, and they're right next to each other.
by glonq on 3/2/23, 8:48 PM
I was in Ecuador last spring and wanted to send a postcard back home to friends.
Long story short, you can buy postcards but there's no stamps. There's also no post offices because the national postal service went bankrupt a couple years ago.
I hear that maybe the national post office got revived in Aug 2022 though?
by dmd on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
In the US, PO Boxes often have their own ZIP code. I used to be able to be reached from anywhere in the world by:
01004-0072 US
by pavlov on 3/2/23, 1:59 PM
In Finland, you can send a letter to Santa Claus with only this address:
```
  Joulupukki 99999 Korvatunturi
```
Where "Joulupukki" is the Finnish name for Santa, and "Korvatunturi" is the mountain where he supposedly lives.
Postal code 99999 was reserved for this purpose.
by belter on 3/2/23, 4:04 PM
Time for a Classic (could not find it on YouTube)
UK House Numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/1961-tonight-hous...
by gumby on 3/2/23, 5:08 PM
In the UK there are several single-line addresses that would probably work (10 Downing St, His Majesty the King, Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth) but they all use more characters than the example presented.
Could the number of characters be reduced?
by petesergeant on 3/2/23, 3:43 PM
Someone has already pointed out that you can allegedly write simply HMRC and expect it to work, but I'd like to point out that there are enough single-use postcodes that presumably you can just write SW1A 1AA and it'll get to the King...
by flir on 3/2/23, 5:53 PM
He's right in the general case (house numbers are guaranteed unique within postcodes, so that's the minimal set of information that makes something deliverable).
But he's wrong - "1 London" works as an address. It's Apsley House.
by suid on 3/3/23, 2:24 AM
There's the old gag about a letter received by the Post Office that it managed to deliver (at least, in the story):
It just said:
```
   Wood
   John
   Hants
```
and is supposed to be read as "John Underwood, Andover, Hants"
by DrBazza on 3/2/23, 9:30 PM
1, London.
https://londonist.com/2016/06/why-does-apsley-house-have-the...
by ronnykylin on 3/2/23, 2:00 PM
It is like the world's youngest time capsule, only a couple of days old.
by poulsbohemian on 3/2/23, 5:08 PM
Aren't there enough named houses in the UK that you could just write something like "Buckingham Palace" or "Downton Abbey" and it would get there without further need of address?
by marstall on 3/3/23, 12:05 AM
In the US I believe zip code is not required? And if you're sending just within your town, maybe not the town/state? So would something like "125 Main" or "4 State" work?
by ezoe on 3/2/23, 1:57 PM
If you expect the post office to manually guess the normalized address from the incomplete form, just a unique narrow area name and your name alone should suffice.
That is, if you have a name unique enough in that area.
by Havoc on 3/2/23, 4:04 PM
I really like the uk post code system. Most website have auto complete. So address is type in 6 digits and select flat number from drop down.
I’ve even seen buildings where different floors have diff codes
by sib on 3/2/23, 6:11 PM
My parents used to successfully get mail addressed to "Green House, [name of lake], New Hampshire"
And I would receive mail to "[lastname] [ZIP + 4]" (when I lived in New York City).
by forinti on 3/2/23, 5:43 PM
Makes me wonder if we shouldn't just assign each building a code.
It could be quite short: four letters and four digits would give you nearly half a billion possibilities.
by PaulHoule on 3/2/23, 6:01 PM
In the US we have ZIP (14817) and ZIP+4 (14817-9709), the latter is highly specific and will get you in the "few buildings" range almost always.
by johnorourke on 3/2/23, 10:12 PM
In the later years of the UK TV show, I'm sure they shortened the postal address to just the show's name: "You've Been Framed."
by frou_dh on 3/2/23, 4:46 PM
I arrived at the same conclusion after thinking about how lazy I could be when scrawling a "From" address on the back of parcels I send.
by mcv on 3/2/23, 4:14 PM
This works in NL too. Postcode identifies a single street, so you only need to add a house number. Something like `1019 KR 90` will work.
by jamesgill on 3/2/23, 8:03 PM
Because most mail is electronically scanned/sorted in the US, you can omit the city and state (though the post office will say no, you can't):
123 Main St.
97201
by hdaz0017 on 3/2/23, 9:30 PM
I did this in 1996, got a friend to send a letter.
Mr XYZ
IBM
I think it took a couple of weeks to get to me - what do I win - .
I guess some people might not know where UK (United Kingdon) is. :)
by l8again on 3/2/23, 1:53 PM
I am looking at this and thinking of the systems we build (in software) and what we can learn from the sublime postal system.
by mattl on 3/2/23, 8:50 PM
I once got a letter delivered to me back in 2009/10 with simply 'Free Software Foundation' on the envelope.
by ShaneMcGowan on 3/2/23, 2:02 PM
In Ireland we have the Eircode system, where each building (even individual apartments) get their own code
by makapuf on 3/2/23, 4:16 PM
In a small town (3000inh) my grandma received a letter with adress
Grandma <town name> <town name>
by nickdothutton on 3/2/23, 3:55 PM
I have had post before addressed to me using only my full name and my town (pop. 22K).
by 4ndrewl on 3/2/23, 5:51 PM
Pretty sure Derek and Clive came up with the shortest London address.
by polakmaly on 3/2/23, 2:00 PM
Why would he publish his own address for the whole internet to see?
by raldi on 3/2/23, 4:03 PM
TCHO Chocolate used to have the address:
```
    Pier 17
    SF
```
by avocadoLife on 3/2/23, 4:44 PM
Hah, I live like 2 roads away from OP. Nice one neighbour!
by base3 on 3/2/23, 9:34 PM
In the 1990s, I received mail addressed to
<my name> CB3 9AJ
by moremetadata on 3/2/23, 1:57 PM
Minimal postal address is:
Building Number/Name Postcode
Postcode is the name of the road or street if its not too long, but some long roads or high density area's may have two or more postcodes for a road or street as do buildings for special entities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...