There are around 115,000 post boxes in the United Kingdom, and the pillar box — the freestanding cast-iron cylinder on the pavement — is one of the country’s most recognisable objects. They are also, unexpectedly, a walkable history of the monarchy.
Trollope
The novelist Anthony Trollope spent thirty-three years working for the Post Office, and it is largely thanks to him that the boxes exist. Sent to the Channel Islands as a surveyor in 1851, he found that collecting post was awkward on islands with irregular ferry sailings, and recommended roadside receiving boxes of the kind used in France and Belgium.
The first were installed in Jersey in 1852, then Guernsey, then the mainland from 1853. Trollope wrote his novels in the early mornings before work, at a fixed word count, before going to the office.
Why red
They were not originally. Early boxes were painted bronze green so as not to intrude on the streetscape — with the entirely predictable result that people walked into them and could not find them when needed.
From 1874 the Post Office began repainting them red for visibility, and the changeover took about a decade. The colour is now a registered trademark shade known as Post Office Red or Pillar Box Red.
Reading the cypher
Every box carries the royal cypher of the monarch reigning when it was cast, which makes dating them straightforward and turns an ordinary walk into a small archaeological exercise:
- VR — Victoria, 1837-1901. Around 100 survive and they are genuinely rare.
- EVIIR — Edward VII, 1901-10.
- GR — George V, 1910-36.
- EVIIIR — Edward VIII, 1936. Only about 160 exist, since he reigned for under a year, and they are the collectors’ prize.
- GVIR — George VI, 1936-52.
- EIIR — Elizabeth II, 1952-2022. By far the most common.
- CIIIR — Charles III, from 2022. The first appeared in 2023.
Scotland
Elizabeth II’s boxes in Scotland carry only a crown, with no cypher. When boxes marked EIIR were installed there in the 1950s several were vandalised and one was blown up, on the argument that there had been no Elizabeth I of Scotland and the numbering was therefore wrong. The Post Office quietly settled on the crown alone, and the arrangement has held ever since.
The other shapes
Not all post boxes are pillars. There are wall boxes set into brickwork, lamp boxes strapped to posts in rural areas, and boxes built into the walls of post offices. A handful of Victorian hexagonal Penfold boxes survive and are much admired.
The gold ones
After the 2012 London Olympics, Royal Mail painted a post box gold in the home town of every British gold medallist — around 110 of them. They were intended to be temporary and proved so popular that they were made permanent, and they remain the only official exception to the red.