Dear LPG, 

I am not sure if you will remember my observations about the recent colour-variations in Lewisham Borough’s post boxes (►►►).  I don’t know why but having written about what I learned that day got me looking on the internet and I found that it is all there if you look closely enough.  

I also found out a few other facts about them.  Did you know that you would be hard pushed to find yourself living more than half a mile away from one in the UK, and we are not the only country to have them dotted around our streets?  They have also become a part of the feature of many streets in other parts of the world too. I am sure many who have visited Malta, Gibraltar, Portugal and Singapore would recognise the unique red structures and I even found an online picture of one in Japan.  But they are not all red.  According to the internet, Hong Kong has at least one green one as does Dublin, Spain and Cyprus can boast yellow ones while during a visit to Portugal or Guernsey you might come across a blue one and we must not forget the gold ones that celebrated our UK Olympic gold medals in 2012.   Although, the USA make their postmen (or should I say mail men) work even harder than ours.  They are one of the countries where many houses have their own personal post boxes at the bottom of the front garden and where both deliveries and collections happen simultaneously.  Residents put the letters they want sent in and the postman swaps them for the ones to be delivered.  I suppose that is a good thing as well as a bad thing.  It makes for more convenience with a much shorter walk involved when sending a letter, but US letter senders miss out on that walk to the end of the street and an opportunity to have a chat with the neighbours as a result I suspect.

Can you remember all the controversy that came with the UK decision to decrease deliveries from three a day to two with less boxes being visited on Sundays back in 2004? 

Another thing that I found out during my virtual walk through the web was that these red pillars of communication have only been around for just over 167 years.  That is quite a while I will admit but when we put it into context it is not that long really.  Apparently the first five in London were put in the centre but then I suppose that people like us, who lived five miles away from the epicentre of the city, were thought of as truly provincial back then.  

Anyway, I thought it would be good to take a little time to commemorate these bright red pillars of our communities today because those first six London post boxes were officially installed on 11th April 1855 and, if they are to remain they must be seen to be being used.  We all know that statistics are key in this modern world of ours and, if there are not enough letters being posted some of our pillar boxes might be deemed to not be needed anymore.  So, while we still have them, we should acknowledge them by sending a letter to a friend a bit more regularly rather than going the quick way and just sending an email, despite the cost of a stamp…

SF, Lewisham

SF offers us her internet evidence…

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