“An object full of civic dignity, the treasure house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls… there it stands at all our street corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under one of the most preposterous
“An object full of civic dignity, the treasure house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls… there it stands at all our street corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under one of the most preposterous of forms.”
Walk through the archway at Old Richmond Palace towards the Green and you will see in front of you a historical rarity. It looks so commonplace that most people walk by without even noticing. It is a red, cast iron, pillar-box, just like any of thousands to be found all over the country, but it differs from them in one unusual way. It carries no royal cipher. The box is blank and anonymous. In 1880 the Post Office, facing the same kind of cutbacks as we are today decided that it could not longer afford the £3 it cost to make a pillar-box. To economise it produced the “Anonymous Cylindrical” box, with an uncomplicated barrel shape, a smaller slot than earlier boxes and no royal cipher. This did not go down well with the public. They complained that the box carried no indication of whom it belonged, the slot was too small for most envelopes and so close to the roof of the box that letters got stuck. They also didn’t go for the ‘no-cipher’ idea. If the pillar-box contained the Royal Mail, they argued, the very least it should do was carry the royal cipher. So in 1887 the Victoria Cipher box appeared, with a larger and lower slot, the words “Post Office” on the front and more importantly Queen Victoria’s monogram. 1887 was a good year for Britain. The first earmuffs were patented, work started on the Eiffel Tower, Balochistan joined the British Empire and Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by slapping the royal moniker on the front of our pillar boxes - a tradition that continues to this day.
Before the introduction of pillar boxes in the early 1850’s all mail had to be either taken directly to the post office for postage or given to a Bellman who would walk the streets ringing a bell to let people know that he was collecting in the area. The cost of postage in those days depended upon how far the letter had to go. For this reason postal correspondence was only available to the rich.
In 1840 Sir Rowland Hill was brought in to reform the Post Office. His first move was to introduce the now famous Penny Black Stamp that fixed the standard rate for posting a letter at 1d, not matter what distance was involved. Suddenly everybody could afford to use the postal service. Such was the demand that in 1852 the first pillar-boxes appeared on UK streets as collection points for the new mail.
One of the earliest designs was the Hexagonal Penfold, designed by J.W Penfold in the early 1860s. Examples of this six-sided box with its elegant pagoda style c