David Gray's pictures of the week 1-1-2007

DAVID GRAY photography
	R O Y A L M A I L P O S T B O X E S
	P I C T U R E S O F T H E W E E K 1 - 1 - 2 0 0 7

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This week's picture feature takes a look at Royal Mail post boxes. We've had all the Christmas cards and now is the time for thank-you letters (and bills), so this is a busy time of year for those familiar red boxes on our streets. The Royal Mail actually delivers an average of 80 million items every day of the year and it has been in business, astonishingly, since 1656. Some pillar boxes may look as if they've been around as long, but the first one appeared in 1855, reportedly an idea of the novelist Anthony Trollope. Now that the Royal Mail has lost most of its monopoly of postal services in Britain, the days of the traditional red box are probably numbered. Another part of our collective national identity threatened by the dead hand of commercialism and bogus "consumer choice". The pictures in this set were taken between 1982 and 2006 in London, Brighton and other places in England.

Victorian post office box in the Sussex village of Glynde in May 2006 (image 2674-63)

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