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> Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place, like 0207 77777777 for a London number To expand on this, the codes have changed a lot over time. Londo
by agurk 4y ago
> Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place, like 0207 77777777 for a London number
To expand on this, the codes have changed a lot over time. London used to have separate codes for inner and outer London, which at their last iteration were 0171 and 0181. These were replaced in 2000 with (020)7 and (020)8 respectively. At this point it still made sense, if inaccurately, to group the first four numbers. There was also some perceived prestige with having an inner London number.
In 2005 (020)3 was included due to a shortage of numbers and (020)4 for the same reason in 2019. With the portability of numbers and the extra ranges it no longer makes sense to group the first four - and the number of people who want to infer location from a landline number is probably much lower these days anyway.
- tow21 4y agoActually, London used to have one area code, "01". Then at some point it was split into inner & outer, and there was endless one-up-manship about whether you had an inner or outer London code. (obviously, inner London was posher)
- Symbiote 4y agoI believe you -- in the large village where I grew up there was some daft division between having a 5-digit area code for a nearby town rather than the (nearer) large city's 4-digit code, and (along roughly the same lines) having <Town, Countyshire> as your official address rather than <Large city>. But it seems odd for London, when there are plenty of posh areas in outer London, and run-down areas of inner London. Maybe it was more for businesses to appear 'central'?
- scrlk 4y agoWikipedia has a surprisingly detailed article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptio...