Genius!
Thanks Richard,
The old locale was C and the new one English_United Kingdom.1252
I created a new index with "varchar_pattern_ops" and off it went!
> the strange thing is my btree indexes on the uk roads data work fine.
>
> Do they use like, or explicit range-checks?
>
> I wasn't using like, which is why they were working. adding a new index
then using the like operator didn't work.
Thanks again.
Will