What counts as the Bay.

The census includes every registered premises inside one drawn boundary: the coastline from Walney to the Wyre mouth buffered about five kilometres, extended to take in the Lancaster urban area, Ulverston, Cartmel and the Cartmel valley, and the Kent estuary head — Arnside, Sandside, Storth, Beetham, Milnthorpe. It excludes the Lune valley east of the M6, everything north of Backbarrow and Greenodd, and Kirkby Lonsdale. The boundary is a drawn line applied to a validated point for every premises; postcode districts are metadata, not the border. See the line on the map.

Boundary draft-2, 2026-07-07 — a draft, awaiting approval. Redrawing it moves premises across the line; nothing is deleted.

Where every point comes from

The ONS postcode register is the position authority. A premises keeps its FHRS register point only when it agrees with its own postcode centroid to within 300 metres; otherwise the centroid is used and the correction logged. Of 4,444 register rows across the three authorities: 1,807 kept their register point, 87 were corrected to their postcode centroid, 239 had no register point and were placed at their centroid, and 776 have no resolvable position — 44 of those stay in the census on address evidence (listed on their town pages as “position unresolved”), the rest are not counted.

Corrected positions · 87

Every premises whose register point disagreed with its postcode by more than 300 metres, largest first. The register’s original coordinates are retained in the data.

No longer listed as Bay · 53

Premises the previous postcode-district filter kept that the drawn boundary places outside. They are retained out of bounds and return the moment an approved boundary includes them.

The full out-of-bounds set is 1,737 rows: the three authorities register premises far beyond the Bay (Kendal, Garstang, the Lakes), and the boundary is what keeps the census honest about them.