Postcodes are a great invention. I guess the problem here is that people do not realise how much information a postcode encodes. Each one is (usually...) either a street or a section of a street.
The 'correct' database thing to do here, I think, assuming you are only handling UK addresses, would be to try to standardise on:
Name
Flat/House No./Name
Street
Town
Postcode
But in practice every system I see sadly ends up with something like:
Name
Address1
Address2
Address3
Address4 or sometimes Town
Address5 (rarer)
Postcode
@tomw Often, but not always, these database systems are designed with the hope that they'll work in many different countries (with different addressing systems) if there's "enough" fields.
Then when people DO write UK-specific systems, they just copy what they saw elsewhere (CS class, StackOverflow, some other application...) and you end up with all these "address lines" again.
@dan Yeah – worse, you see UK as a thin translation layer (at best) for what is "zip codes" etc internally, and does some completely wrong things. Like Nationbuilder stripping leading zeroes from phone numbers, which I bet it does to this day.
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