Address

An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used to give the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using political boundaries and street names as references, along with other identifiers such as house or apartment numbers and organization name. Some addresses also contain special codes, such as a postal code, to make identification easier and aid in the routing of mail. Addresses provide a means of physically locating a building. They are used in identifying buildings as the end points of a postal system and as parameters in statistics collection, especially in census-taking and the insurance industry. Address formats are different in different places, and unlike latitude and longitude coordinates, there is no simple mapping from an address to a location. == History == Until the 18th and 19th centuries, most houses and buildings were not numbered. In London, one of the first recorded instances of a street being numbered was Prescot Street in Goodman’s Fields in 1708. Street naming and numbering began under the age of Enlightenment, also as part of campaigns for census and military conscription, such as in the dominions of Maria Theresa in the mid 18th century. Numbering allowed the efficient delivery of mail, as the postal system evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries to reach widespread usage. In London, house numbering was not regulated until the Metropolitan Management Act of 1855, which granted the newly formed Board of Works the power to control street naming and numbering.