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The UK’s iconic red postboxes have undergone the biggest redesign in 175 years as Royal Mail adds solar panels and parcel scanners to the quintessentially British piece of street furniture. Dubbed “postboxes for the future”, 3,500 of these overhauled new pillar boxes will be rolled out nationally in the next few months.
New design features include a lop-sided topper which goes on top of the traditional red boxes and contains the solar power technology. At the front of the box, a new, large drop-down parcel deposit hatch has been installed, allowing people to scan and dispatch packages without having to use a Post Office. Royal Mail has had to find new ways to compete with rivals in the delivery market including provate courier delivery services and parcel drop-off lockers, with damning figures this month revealing the service delivered one in four first-class letters late. The new postboxes are capable of handling parcels to the size of a shoebox and the design has been matched to an earlier iteration from the Victorian era.
Royal Mail said customers will now be able to scan a barcode via the Royal Mail app to open a drop-down drawer, designed for parcels too big to fit through the traditional slot. The redesigned boxes also feature a separate slot for letters, as well as a solar panel to power the scanner and drawer.
The postboxes were piloted in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire in April and they are now rolling out across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Cities including Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Sunderland will be among the first locations to receive them.
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 they now have more than 23,500 locations where customers can send, return and collect parcels, including 2,000 lockers, 7,500 Collect+ stores, 11,500 Post Office branches, 1,200 Royal Mail Customer Service Points and 1,400 parcel postboxes.
Author Anthony Trollope proposed the introduction of postboxes in Britain, probably after seeing roadside letter boxes in France and Belgium, in 1850 while working as a surveyor’s clerk for the Post Office.
A trial on the Channel Islands was approved and on November 23, 1852, four cast-iron pillar boxes were installed in Jersey with an extension to the trial in Guernsey the next year.
After a successful trial period in Jersey and Guernsey, the first pillar boxes appeared in Britain from 1853.
These early letter boxes were not standardised as design, manufacture and installation were 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 unobtrusive that complaints were received as people had difficulty finding them.
The iconic red colour of the pillar boxes was then standardised in 1874, though it took 10 years to complete the programme of re-painting.
In Liverpool, the District Surveyor commissioned his own non-standard pillar box in 1862 – known now as the Liverpool Special.
There were a few exceptions to the iconic red pillar boxes. In the 1930s, blue boxes for posting airmail letters were installed – but these were removed, repainted red and re-entered service for standard mail by 1939.
In 2012, postboxes in the hometowns of Britain’s Olympic gold medallists were painted gold.
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