Daniel is thirty-four, lives in Sheffield, and runs a small consultancy on the side. In 2019 he did what every accountant tells you to do: he formed a limited company. The setup took twenty minutes, cost £12, and he typed his home address into two fields because there were no other addresses to type. He thought nothing of it.
In April 2026 his ex-partner's brother sent him a screenshot from 192.com. It showed Daniel's old Sheffield address, his date of birth, and the name of the company he had quietly dissolved in 2023. The data was free. It took the brother about ninety seconds to find.
Daniel's case is not unusual. It is the default outcome of being a director in the United Kingdom, and the work of unwinding it is more procedural than people expect.
Two addresses, both of them yours
When you incorporate in England and Wales, you supply two addresses to Companies House. The first is the registered office, where official post can be served. The second is the director's service address, where Companies House and HMRC write to you personally. Both are published, in full, on a website that ranks on the first page of Google for your own name.
For most first-time directors, both fields default to the same place: home. There is no warning, no nudge, no second screen asking are you sure you want your kitchen on the internet. The form simply accepts what you type and publishes it the same day.
You can change either address later — to an accountant, a virtual office in Holborn for £8 a month, or a relative's address. The trouble starts with everything filed before you make the change.
The historic-filings loophole
Companies House is a register, not a CMS. When you file a confirmation statement, an annual return, or an appointment, the document is preserved as an immutable image. Updating your address today does not edit yesterday's filings. They sit in the public archive as PDFs, with your old home address printed plainly on page one.
This is the so-called historic record loophole, though it is less a loophole than a deliberate design choice. If filings could be silently rewritten, creditors and journalists could not rely on them. The trade-off is that a single 2019 confirmation statement can leak your address for the rest of your life unless you ask, in writing, for it to be suppressed.
Updating your address today does not edit yesterday's filings. They sit in the public archive, with your old home address printed plainly on page one.
SR01: the form most directors have never heard of
The remedy is a form called SR01, the application under Section 1088 of the Companies Act 2006 to remove a residential address from the public register. It costs £32 per address, payable to Companies House, and must be filed on paper to the Cardiff office. You list every document on which the address appears and pay the fee per affected address. Processing takes five to ten working days.
Once granted, Companies House marks the address as protected and redacts it within the archived PDFs. New filings will not include it provided you have also updated your service address. For most directors this is the first they have ever heard of the protection regime, which is striking given that the right has existed since 2018.
SR01 has limits. It does not cover addresses still in use as the registered office of a trading company, nor appointments where you have signed using the residential address as your service address. And it does only what it says: it suppresses the address on the Companies House register. Nothing more.
The aggregators do not care what Companies House does
This is the part nobody tells Daniel. The data is scraped, mirrored, and repackaged by a chain of UK aggregators: 192.com, Endole, Company Check, UK Data, SearchBug UK, and a dozen smaller sites. They cache the records, enrich them with electoral-roll snapshots, and resell access on monthly subscriptions. A successful SR01 does not propagate to any of them.
Each runs its own opt-out. 192.com wants a written request with proof of ID and gives no formal SLA. Endole has an online form and tends to respond within two weeks. Company Check requires a GDPR Article 17 erasure request by email. None of them volunteer to help.
A complete scrub therefore looks like a chain, not a single action:
- Change the registered office and director service address at Companies House to something that is not your home.
- File SR01 with the £32 fee for each residential address that appears in historic filings.
- Submit opt-outs to 192.com, Endole, Company Check, and the rest of the UK directory tier.
- Where the cached page survives the opt-out, file a Google delisting request citing the now-suppressed source.
- Re-search your own name a month later. Repeat for the stragglers.
What Daniel did
Daniel changed his registered office to a virtual office in Sheffield for £6 a month. He paid £32 for SR01 covering his old home address across four historic filings and his 2023 dissolution paperwork. The redaction came through eight working days later.
The aggregators took longer. Endole removed his record within nine days. 192.com took a month and asked twice for additional ID. Company Check initially refused on the grounds that the data was “public record”, which is true and irrelevant — Article 17 still applies — and complied after a firmer second email citing the ICO's guidance. One smaller site, UK Data, never responded; Google delisted the cached page on the second attempt.
From start to finish, the active work was about six hours spread over eight weeks. The hardest part was not the paperwork. It was knowing that there were six other places to write to, and what to put in each letter.
The takeaway
If you have ever incorporated a UK company, the safe assumption is that your home address is sitting in at least three places online right now: Companies House itself, two or three aggregators, and the cache of one or two search engines. The SR01 is the start of the work, not the whole of it.
If you would rather not spend a Saturday writing GDPR letters, Nox Æterna handles the full UK chain — Companies House SR01, the aggregator opt-outs, and the Google delistings — in one £89 payment. We file, we wait, we re-check, and we send you the PDF proof when each address is gone.