Friday 10 October 2014

Post boxes

Most people pass straight by street furniture with scarcely a glance but I happened to notice a rarity which, for a short time, got me looking more closely for other examples of post boxes.

The British post box is well known across the world.  Those red pillars have hardly altered in design for nigh on a century.  In fact, for more than a century.  But what many people outside Britain - and possibly quite a few in Britain - don't realise is that they can be used as very approximate measures of the time it takes a town to spread.  You see, each post box carries the royal insignia, the insignia of the sovereign on the throne at the time the box was installed.  The earliest carried the insignia (or is it monogram?) of Queen Victoria.  Then we have Edward VII, George V, George VI and, finally, Elizabeth II.  But, just for a few months in the 1930s, there was another - Edward VIII.  And it was a post box with his insignia that I had spotted.

And so, for a little while, I looked out for the different insignia in an attempt to photograph each one.  I never did find VR, but those are mainly in town centres and I rarely get there.  I got the rest, though - including this slightly unusual model:




Do you think this would qualify me for membership of the Dull Men's Club?



3 comments:

joeh said...

Perhaps.

joeh said...

Perhaps.

Mike@Bit About Britain said...

I'd never thought of them that way; very clever! Checkout the one in the wall on my recent post about Keld - though that probably replaced an earlier, Viking one. Did you know there's a village in Scotland called Dull? It is linked with Boring in Oregan. Tell that to Uncle Skip!