Postal Letter

How do the postal codes work in the UK?

Say this post code for example - NE21 I know the NE (or the first two letters of any post code) is whatever city is the closest to where you live, in this case Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but what does the 21 mean? How many miles you are from the city...? And what about the last three numbers/letters? What do they stand for?

Public Comments

1. The link has a lot of information, but it does look very complicated.
2. the post code is just that, a code for an address. The 1st part is the postcode area, there are 124 areas in the UK, it's then narrowed down to a group of addresses using the last letters and numbers There are no hard and fast rules for the size of a postcode area so you can't tell how far an area is from another
3. The letter part of the first part of the postcode, NE, in this example, identifies the main sorting office the mail passes through, and the number afterwards is a "sector" - the main sorting office is usually in sector 1. The numbering of the sectors indicates nothing about how far from the sorting office they are, they're fairly random though generally the higher numbers are further away. The second part of the postcode identifies part of an individual postman's delivery round. - usually part of a street, or block of flats, or a large business.
4. M60 is the centre of Manchester, and it borders M1. The number just means the area. Letter/s : city or town (or in London, the region) Number/s : the area Number : a part of the area 2 letters : a particular set of buildings. A Mancunian postcode would be something like M60 4RT or M1 9SE