The message
from Andy Dingley contains these words:

I live in a house that used to be a house over a shop (physically it
still is). When the shop ceased to be commercial for council tax
purposes, the PO managed to delete the entire address and place a gap on
the terraced street. Bank accounts were no longer openable here, various
sorts of ecommerce checks no longer worked. A damn nuisance all round,
yet the PO were uninterested in doing anything about it.

The Royal Mail database uprooted my house (not physically obviously) and
plonked it down in a different road with a different postcode. Judging
by the the postcode they moved it about a quarter of a mile. When
challenged they claimed not to know who provided them with the bogus
information but said it must have been someone they trusted. The said
trustees could have been the Dept of Environment in their guise as TV
licence enforcers who bombarded my house name under yet another road
address* with threats for more than a decade.

They did however modify the address on the database at my request and I
actually ended up with a more informative address than the one I should
have. Now I have an address in the form of house name, road, parish,
town. The local authority had previously refused to include the road in
the address presumably on the grounds that the road wasn't actually in
the same parish as the house so now it is only official communications
such as polling cards that turn up sans road reference. OTOH I do
occasionally still get mail addressed to the bogus address despite the
false address being removed from the database in 1998.

*That at least was the name they had resurrected for a small group of
also unnumbered houses that are my closest neighbours on my side of the
road. Incidentally that renaming had put another neighbours nose out of
joint as said name was the name of their house on an adjacent road.

--
Roger Chapman