Royal Mail’s new solar-panelled postboxes will have parcel slot

British postboxes have been green, blue, red, and even golden in their 175-year history. Now for the first time the pillars are set to become solar-powered.

Royal Mail is bringing in 3,500 “postboxes of the future” across the UK, which will have a digitally activated drop-down drawer for parcels as large as a shoebox.

The redesign will improve customers’ experience of sending parcels through Royal Mail, which has faced burgeoning competition from private courier delivery services and parcel drop-off lockers since its monopoly ended in 2006.

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.”

The postboxes were trialled in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire in April and will now be installed in cities including Edinburgh, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Sunderland.

Customers will scan a barcode on the Royal Mail app to open the solar-powered drawer for parcels too large for the traditional letter slot.

The digital aspects of the new model are powered by small solar panels on top

ROYAL MAIL

The pillars will also feature a separate slot for letters, with proof of posting and parcel tracking available through the Royal Mail app.

“There are 115,000 postboxes in the UK, located within half a mile of 98 per cent of addresses, making them by far the most convenient network of parcel drop-off points in the UK,” Clarkson said.

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“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.”

In addition to the new boxes, Royal Mail said it now had 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.

A postbox is installed in Ilford, 1936

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The redesign will be the biggest in the 175-year history of postboxes.

Before their introduction, letters could be posted at a Receiving House or through the bellman, who wore a uniform and rang a bell to collect letters from the public.

In 1850, the novelist Anthony Trollope, who was working as a surveyor’s clerk for the Post Office, proposed the use of roadside letterboxes, which he was likely to have seen in France and Belgium.

A trial was approved on the Channel Islands and in 1851 the first four cast-iron pillar boxes were installed on Jersey, then on Guernsey the following year.

After the trial’s success, postboxes appeared on the British mainland from 1853.

By 1859, all pillar boxes were standardised in two sizes — a larger model for high volume areas and narrower for elsewhere, with a cylindrical shape, painted green.

However, there were so many complaints that people had difficulty finding the green boxes that the Post Office decided in 1874 to return to red, the colour used in the original Channel Island trial.

A postman collects letters from an air mail letterbox in London. The blue pillar boxes were used during the 1930s

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It took ten years to repaint all the postboxes the standardised red, and they have remained that colour since, save for a few exceptions.

In the 1930s, blue boxes for posting airmail letters were installed but these were removed and repainted red for standard mail by 1939.

In 2012, postboxes in the home towns of Great Britain’s London 2012 Olympic Games gold medal winners were painted gold.