All content on British Place Names is either in the public domain or published under an Open licence.
British Place Names is a comprehensive gazetteer of every named place in Great Britain, as recorded by Ordnance Survey. This includes every populated place (cities, towns, villages and hamlets) as well as every named landform such as mountains and hills, along with other local place names.
The list and categorisation of place names is derived entirely from Ordnance Survey Open Data products, including the OpenNames dataset, the OpenNames API, OS Open Map and the 50k Gazetteer. These have been combined to form a unified database of every named place in Great Britain.
Place names listed here do not include street names or building names.
British Place Names also uses data published by the Office of National Statistics in order to link entries to postcodes and administrative units.
British Place Names also includes entries from historical gazetteers for many populated places. Historical content published on British Place Names has, where possible, been combined and cross-referenced from multiple sources, so individual entries cannot necessarily be ascribed to a single source. However, we would like to acknowledge the following as sources of either the underlying text or indices of the text enabling it to be linked to contemporary gazetteers:
Where possible, populated place entries also include relevent text from the Domesday Book. Domesday data is based on a digitised database created by the University of Hull and with reference to the Open Domesday website developed by Anna Powell-Smith.
Domesday data presented here is deliberately simplified and does not attempt to be a full copy of Domesday.