The Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) is an eight-digit unique identifier (a

geocode A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity (location or object). It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the ''geocode'' is a human-readable an ...

) for every street across Great Britain. The USRNs for England and Wales exists within the

National Street Gazetteer The National Street Gazetteer (NSG) is a database of all streets in England and Wales compiled from the responsible highway authorities which is restricted to local authorities and statutory undertakers (e.g. for maintenance or installing service ...

(NSG), the authoritative source of information about streets in England and Wales and is a compilation of data from 173 highway authorities' Local Street Gazetteers. The NSG is managed by GeoPlace as a joint venture between the

Local Government Association The Local Government Association (LGA) is the national membership body for local authorities. Its core membership is made up of 339 English councils and the 22 Welsh councils through the Welsh Local Government Association. The LGA is p ...

and

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was ...

to create definitive national databases of addresses and streets. USRNs in Scotland are managed by the Improvement Service, and in Northern Ireland by the Department for Infrastructure. The USRN is available from the NSG and included in Ordnance Survey's OS MasterMap Highways Network product. USRNs can also be found on the site Find My Street created by GeoPlace. From 1 July 2020, the Government requires USRNs and Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) to be available under an

Open Government Licence The Open Government Licence is a Public copyright license, copyright licence for Crown copyright works published by the UK government. Other UK public sector bodies may apply it to their publications. It was developed and is maintained by The Nat ...

(OGL). The OS Open USRN dataset is derived from the OS MasterMap Highways Network product. The

Government Digital Service The Government Digital Service is a unit of the Government of the United Kingdom's Cabinet Office tasked with transforming the provision of online public services. It was formed in April 2011 to implement the "Digital by Default" strategy pro ...

has mandated the UPRN and USRN as "the public sector standard for referencing and sharing property and street information".

References

External links

{{Wikidata property, P8447
Find My Street

Map of USRNs
overlaid on

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed ...

data Streets in the United Kingdom Geocodes