The iconic red postbox is to undergo its biggest facelift in its 175-year life. Royal Mail has announced the post-modern designs will include solar panels and scanners so they now accept parcels.
The postal service today (Wednesday, August 27) unveiled Britain’s “postboxes of the future” which will start being used nationwide in the coming months, as part of its war against private couriers and drop-off lockers. They’re reminiscent of the original Victorian design, which allowed customers to send and received goods the size of a shoebox via a postbox for the first time.
A novel feature will let senders scan a barcode on the Royal Mail app which tells the postbox to open a swanky drop-down drawer, designed for parcels too big to fit through the traditional slot at the top. There will also be a separate slot for letters, as well as the solar panel to power the scanner and drawer.
The new tech was trialled in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire in April and is now being rolled out across the rest of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It has been confirmed cities including Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Sunderland will be among the first to get the new postboxes so Londoners will have a while to wait until they reach the capital.
Jack Clarkson, managing director of out of home and commercial excellence at Royal Mail, said: “We are all sending and returning more parcels than ever before. This trend will only continue as online shopping shows no signs of slowing, particularly with the boom of second-hand marketplaces.
“There are 115,000 postboxes in the UK located within half a mile of 98% of addresses, making them by far the most convenient network of parcel drop-off points in the UK. Our message is clear, if you have a Royal Mail label on your parcel, and it fits, put it in a postbox and we’ll do the rest.”
Royal Mail say it now has over 23,500 locations where service-users can send, return and collect parcels. This includes 2,000 lockers, 7,500 Collect+ stores, 11,500 Post Office branches, 1,200 Royal Mail Customer Service Points and 1,400 parcel postboxes.
The idea of the postbox was first proposed by author Anthony Trollope, likely after he saw road-side letter boxes in France and Belgium, when living there in 1850. After successful trials in Jersey and Guernsey, the first boxes were operational from 1853.
They were not standardised as design, manufacture and installation was largely the responsibility of local surveyors. By 1859, all pillar boxes were standardised in two sizes, a larger size for high volume areas and narrower for elsewhere, with a cylindrical shape, painted green.
These green letter boxes were so unremarkable that people complained they had difficulty finding them. The iconic red colour of the pillar boxes was then standardised in 1874, though repainting took 10 years.
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