Assigning addresses from Land Registry Prices Paid data

After the disappointment of the Land Registry INSPIRE land parcels, it is nice to report a large and useful open dataset from the same source: the Prices Paid data (LRPP). These are the actual prices paid for houses and flats in England and Wales from late-1995 or thereabouts to the present.

New Residential Roads in England and Wales
Roads were identified from Land Registry Prices Paid data
and matched by name to OSM highways within 2km of postcode centroid

Not very INSPIREd: Land Registry 'Open' Data

Many OpenStreetMap contributors have been very excited about the potential for importing address information from data sets released under the European Union's INSPIRE directive. Our experience in the UK tends to make us more cautious in our expectations, and so it proved with the latest release of Open Government Data under this programme.

Comparison of Land Registry parcels with gardens on OSM in Sutton Coldfield
Scatter plot with log-log scale.

Firstly, (another) quick word about the complexities of organisation of cadastral data in the UK. There are separate cadastral agencies for each of England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (note the Oxford comma), which run in different ways: not least because the legal framework of Scot's Law is quite different from English Law. Thus the data released only relates to England and Wales.