11th April: Pillar Boxes

On this date in 1855, the first pillar boxes appeared in London. Here are ten things you may not know about pillar boxes.

1. How did people post letters before there were pillar boxes? They took them to a post office, or a coaching inn where coaches would stop to let passengers off, and pick up the mail.
2. The pillar box was invented by the novelist Anthony Trollope. His day job at the time was Post Office Surveyor for the Western District. His boss, Sir Rowland Hill, Secretary of the Post Office, sent him to the Channel Islands to sort out the mail problems there. The difficulties were around the irregular sailing of the Royal Mail boats due to the tides.
3. The solution Trollope came up with, a “letter-receiving pillar”, was inspired by a similar device he had previously seen in Paris.
4. The Channel Islands got pillar boxes in late 1852 and 1853. It is recorded in the Post Office archives that the first box in the UK was erected in Botchergate, Carlisle in 1853. The first six in London were installed on 11 April 1855.
5. Pillar boxes weren't always round and red. The first ones in London, designed by Grissel and Son of Hoxton Ironworks were rectangular, although surmounted by a decorative ball. Londoners didn't like them - they said they were ugly, and so they were replaced. Only one survived, and was to be kept for posterity - but was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz.
6. Other shapes have been used such as hexagonal Penfolds, and an oval shape that is used mainly for the large "double aperture" boxes most often seen in large cities like London. According to the Letter Box Study Group, there are more than 150 recognised designs and varieties of pillar boxes and wall boxes, not all of which have known surviving examples.
7. There wasn't a standard colour until 1859. Even then, they weren't red. Green was chosen because green would be unobtrusive. They were unobtrusive all right - people kept walking into them! So in 1874 it was decided that unobtrusiveness wasn't the way to go, and all pillar boxes should be painted red. It took ten years to repaint every pillar box in the UK.
8. Today, there are also a few gold ones. In the home towns of every Team GB member who won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics, there is a gold pillar box. Originally, they were going to be repainted red eventually, but now they will stay gold.
9. Royal Mail estimates there are over 100,000 post boxes in the United Kingdom.
10. Pillar boxes are fitted with a brass security lock. The contractor for these locks has been the Chubb Locks company for many years. There is no skeleton key for these locks. Each post box has its own set of keys, so postal workers have to carry large bunches of keys when clearing the boxes.