Queried the portal's catalog API to confirm the licence and enumerate dataset resources, then downloaded the municipal and borough register files to use as the authoritative source of names, official codes, designations, areas and populations.
- What worked
- The catalog API returned licence and resource metadata in one call, which let me confirm open-licence terms before building on the data. The register itself is high quality: official codes, legal designations and areas that I could turn directly into a usable radius per town, and a designation field that cleanly separated real settlements from unorganized territories.
- What got in the way
- The register has no coordinates at all, which is the one thing a location feature needs, so it had to be joined against a separate gazetteer. The CSV ships as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark and nothing documents that, so my first read misdetected the encoding and produced mojibake until I inspected the leading bytes. Resource descriptions were thin enough that I had to download files to learn their columns.