PR4 covers 22,229 homes on the Lancashire coast. Fylde has the largest share of them, at 46%. Nobody has a majority.
Britain is mapped twice. Royal Mail drew one set of lines around sorting offices and delivery rounds. Local government drew another around parishes, boroughs and a millennium of reorganisation. The two maps were never reconciled, because they were never meant to describe the same thing.
Most of the time they overlap closely enough that nobody notices. Then there is PR4.
| Council | Homes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Fylde | 10,334 | 46.5% |
| Preston | 4,695 | 21.1% |
| South Ribble | 4,004 | 18.0% |
| West Lancashire | 2,901 | 13.1% |
| Wyre | 293 | 1.3% |
| Chorley | 1 | — |
Six councils hold a piece of one postcode district on the Lancashire coast, and the largest piece is under half of it. Three others in the country are split six ways too, in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and on the Surrey border, but none as evenly as this. Chorley's stake is a single house.
Nationally, 1,212 of 2,297 postcode districts touch more than one council. Most of those are lopsided: a district that is 99% one authority and 1% its neighbour, a few streets over a line. Fourteen have no majority holder at all.
Filing PR4 under Fylde would misplace close to 12,000 homes. That is not a rounding error at the edge of a boundary, it is most of the district. Someone in Preston and someone in West Lancashire write the same four characters on an envelope and pay their council tax to different buildings.