Postcrossing Blog

We met Lucy (aka Lucy156) a couple of years ago in Oxford, and we were immediately struck by her cheerfulness and sense of humor! Plus, she informed us which magazine had free Doctor Who postcards… we were instant friends! :) Here’s her interview:

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I discovered Postcrossing in June 2006, quite by accident! I was searching for new penpals to exchange letters and postcards with and found this site! I immediately liked the idea of sending postcards to many different people across the world, from different cultures, to share views of where I live and have visited but also to learn more about where they live and places that they have visited.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

My other interests, besides Postcrossing of course, are penpalling, listening to a wide range of music from classical to jazz and blues to rock, watching various drama and sci-fi programmes, going to the cinema and taking weekends away with my partner Mark in out red VW campervan called Babs.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

My local post office and post box is just a short trip into town for me. The staff at the office know me well and always save a sheet of new stamps when they are issued for me to collect, which makes me very happy!

My mailbox is in the communal area in the block of apartments where I live… my postman enjoy seeing all the different kinds of cards I get and has admitted to looking through them before dropping them into my box!

I file all my received cards into boxes by country, which I really enjoy organising. My available cards are also sorted into boxes by theme so that I can easily find them!

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I love being surprised when I open my mail box to find a new postcard in there and getting online to register it and find out more about the area where the card has come from or discover more about the theme that it relates to! I enjoy updating my flickr page with received postcards and ones that I have ready to send…I like to try and find a special one for each person that I get details of and enjoy taking the time to do this. I have a Blogger page too which is fun to keep, when I find time between sending postcards and penpal letters!

I also enjoy taking part in the Round Robins and tags on the forum, where I get to meet so many more people and get lots of great postcards on the themes I enjoy!

Have you been surprised by any place that you have received a postcard from or sent a postcard to?

One of my earliest postcards was from Nicaragua, which I am sorry to say I did not know where it was at the time when I received it! At least my knowledge of geography has hopefully improved with the help from Postcrossing!

Have you met any other members in real life?

I have been luckily enough to attend 2 International Postcrossing Meetup’s in Oxford in 2013 and London in 2014! I met Ana and Paulo, founders of Postcrossing, who are two of the nicest and most genuine people I have ever met along with many others who attended from across the UK, Europe and beyond!

Is there anything that you are passionate about?

I love watching Strictly Come Dancing, having been a ballroom and latin american dancer prior to an accident in 2011 which resulted in partial paralysis. I have been lucky enough to dance with one of the professionals on the UK show, Anton du Beke. I enjoy exploring the UK and Europe either as a driving holiday or on a cruise ship, particularly to places with history, museums, galleries and places which has unusual features to photography!

Anu (aka ichabodhides) comes from Finland, but moved to the UK some years ago for love… which she discovered on a martial arts’ class! :)

Here is her spotlight interview:

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I had been aware of Postcrossing for a while before I actually decided to sign up. I think I first read about it in a magazine, quite possibly the magazine the Finnish postal services distribute to every household every so often. I was finishing my university studies at the time and was quite stressed about my master’s thesis so I thought it would be nice to find something other than just bills in my mailbox. I used to write a lot of letters and I still do that occasionally (but am a pretty rubbish pen pal these days), but postcards are a lot quicker to write. I’ve always enjoyed sending and receiving postcards and family and friends used to send me postcards from their holidays even before I had heard of Postcrossing and I still have a lot of these postcards saved.

I got hooked pretty much immediately – it was great to hear from new people all around the world and look at the pretty pictures on postcards I received.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

My main interest outside of Postcrossing is Aikido, a Japanese martial art. I’ve been practicing since 2005 and am currently a 2nd Dan black belt. Aikido has been a pretty life-changing experience for me – it’s the reason I live in England now and I met my husband there. I joined a university Aikido club when I was an Erasmus exchange student in England in 2005–2006. I met Matt (now my husband) there and fell in love. I had to go back to Finland to finish my studies but moved back to England in early 2008 once I had graduated. Matt and I are currently living with his family and their 6 cats, 2 Labrador puppies and a rabbit. We got married in 2011 and our wedding was accidentally (??) a little Aikido-themed. Most of my friends are from Aikido as well so it plays a pretty major role in my life. I still practice at the university as they allow ex-students to continue practicing but we might have to find somewhere else next year unfortunately.

Apart from Aikido I also enjoy crocheting, cooking and baking, reading and watching tv shows & movies on my laptop.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

We don’t have a “proper” mailbox at home, just a slot in the front door.

I go to a few post offices in my area when I need to buy stamps or send something slightly bigger than a regular postcard or an envelope. The one here, inside a shop, is one I visit quite often as I live quite close and the queues aren’t usually too bad.

This is the mail box I normally use to send my cards as it’s the closest to where I live.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I couldn’t possibly pick just one postcard as I’ve received so many great ones. However, the first one I ever received, CH-8925 from Switzerland, has a special place in my heart – I still remember how excited I was to receive it! Zasa and I have swapped a few postcards since and occasionally still bump into each other online, which makes it all even nicer.

A few other postcards I particularly like:

From left: FI-1033072 from Sirks, FR-46083 from thaddee_calisson, GB-44737 from toucans.

From left: AU-25762 from Claire, NP-346 from spellbindguy, FI-544673 from veverka.

What is it your favorite part of the Postcrossing process?

I enjoy sending just as much as receiving and like to try to match the recipients’ wishes whenever I can. I also like to use nice stamps whenever I can although this isn’t very easy at times because British post offices don’t always have particularly good selections of nice stamps available.

Have you met any other members in real life?

Yes. Pipey from the UK, Astrid1978 from the Netherlands, duffeli from Finland and a few other Finnish Postcrossers I met in a mini meet-up in Helsinki some years ago, and quite a lot of Postcrossers in international meet-ups in London a few years ago as well.

218 years ago today, the great Rowland Hill was born! If his name does not ring a bell, read on – we have tales of postal corruption and innovation to share with you today!

Once upon a time, the British postal system was… a mess. Expensive, complex and widely corrupt, it was seen as wasteful and inadequate for the needs of a growing industrial nation. For instance, did you know that correspondence at the time was paid by the recipient and it depended on the distance travelled and number of paper sheets it contained? As a result, people often cross-wrote letters to save space or encoded messages on the cover of the letter – which could be analyzed and then discarded without payment. A significant percentage of letter-writers would also abuse the system by sending their correspondence under the personal frank of members of the parliament (who could send them without paying).

Rowland Hill, a teacher from Worcestershire, studied the state of the postal service for several years, before producing a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform; its Importance and Practicability”, in early 1837. In in, Hill called for “low and uniform rates” according to weight, rather than distance:

“The postage on all letters received in a post-town, and delivered in the same, or any other post-town in the British Isles, shall be at the uniform rate of one penny per half ounce”.

He also showed that most of the costs incurred in mail delivery were not for transport but rather handling at the origins and destinations – and these could be greatly reduced if pre-payment of postage by the sender was implemented. In order to achieve this, Rowland Hill proposed official pre-printed lettersheets and adhesive stamps – a piece of paper “covered at the back with a glutinous wash”.

The plan was met with resistance from the part of Royal Mail, but also with plenty of support from traders, merchants and bankers, fed up with the high costs and the corruption of the system in place. With a lot of pressure from these groups, Rowland Hill was appointed to the Treasury, in order to put his plan into operation: the Postal Reform was born!

A design competition was held to figure out how to implement the prepaid postage, and after a few false starts, the Penny Black made its debut in May 1840. It featured an engraving of a very young Queen Victoria, based on a commemorative medal sculpted by William Wyon.

The success of Rowland Hill’s reforms were mixed. One one hand, the financial cost of the Uniform Penny Post was disastrous and it would take over 30 years for Royal Mail to reach once more the revenue levels they had before 1840. On the other hand, postal traffic was greatly increased, since the lower cost made postal communications more affordable and accessible to the masses – paving the way to the development of many sectors of the economy.

Rowland Hill was knighted in 1860 for his many services to the United Kingdom. His legacy lives on in the form of the modern postal service.

Mail can be moved in many different ways, as the newest series of Europa stamps shows… but did you know that this process was once done with the help of wagons that whizzed by in a metal tunnel, deep underneath the bustling streets of London?

We’re talking about the UK's Post Office Underground Railway, charmingly later referred to as Mail Rail, a driverless electric underground railway system used to move post between sorting offices in London. It was constructed throughout the 1910s and 1920s with combined efforts of the Post Office and the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, inspired by the Chicago Tunnel Company’s underground railway freight tunnel network.

Rail Mail tunnel, by Richard Pope, on Flickr.

The railway began its operations on December 3rd, 1927. It ran from east to west and stretched six and a half miles between the East End and Paddington. Consisting of eight stations, the largest existed below Mount Pleasant. At its peak, a new train of mail arrived at the station every six minutes. Employees had to work very quickly in order to remove all the mail whose destination was Mount Pleasant and load any mail destined for other offices. There was a great camaraderie between staff members, who generally spent their entire careers working on the system. You can see evidence of this from the relics left behind on walls near major mailbag chutes: a dartboard, finished paintings, and a collection of stamps.

Only three other cities attempted an underground postal railway: Munich, Germany in 1910, Lucerne, Switzerland in 1927, and Zurich, Switzerland in 1937. All closed their operations in the 80’s. The Chicago Tunnel Company sometimes delivered parcels, but its main function was not associated with the Post Office.

By 2003, only three stations of London’s Post Office Underground Railway remained. Royal Mail had reported that using Mail Rail cost five times more than using road transport for the same task, and so, after 75 years of operation, the railway shut down on May 31st, 2003. Today, the British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA) has been undertaking efforts to conserve parts of the Mail Rail.

Rail Mail wagons, by Yuriy Akopov on Flickr.

You can learn more about their endeavors and about the railway itself at the BPMA Museum’s Mail Rail page and fantastic Flickr gallery. If you’re in the area, they currently have a free photography exhibition about the Mail Rail that you can visit!

If you’ve ever been to the U.K., you may have seen bright red cylindrical objects around town. These pillar boxes are the U.S. equivalent of the free-standing blue arch-like mailboxes (and should not be confused with pillarboxes, which are the black bars that appear to the sides of a movie image that wasn’t formatted for widescreen). Although they’re more common in the U.K. or in former nations of the British empire, versions of this special red post box can also be found in other countries, such as Japan or Portugal.

Pillar boxes started to appear in 1852, twelve years after the first adhesive postage stamp was introduced. Before then, citizens would have to take their outgoing mail to the nearest letter receiving house or post office and personally deliver it to the postmaster after purchasing a stamp. Although they were initially proposed in 1840 by Sir Rowland Hill (who thought they would “add greatly to the public convenience”), it wasn’t until 1852 that the first pillar boxes were erected in the Channel Islands. It was a successful trial, which later spread with their implementation accross the mainland.

The boxes varied slightly from one area to the next, as each District Surveyor gave their own specifications for the design. You can find the most unique-looking ones that were made early on, when they included things like octagonal pillars, fluted columns, vertical slits instead of horizontal ones, and different coloring. The construction of pillar boxes was standardized in 1905, generally made of cast iron and in a cylindrical shape.

There are three distinct parts of a pillar box: the cap, which sits on the carcass and is bolted down from the inside, the door, which is hinged and displays the Royal Cypher of the reigning monarch, and the carcass, the main body that produced down below ground level, giving stability to the pillar box. Over 150 designs and varieties of pillar boxes, and their cousins, wall boxes (mail receptacles that are set into a walls), have emerged, though not all have survived.

Next time you’re in the UK, or any other country that sports these postal beauties, look a little closer and see if you can guess what time period it was erected (check out this page for some clues on the Royal cyphers)!

For a more in depth look into the history of these boxes, check out “Well adapted for a purpose…”, a really neat post from the British Postal Museum’s blog.

Happy pillar box spotting! :)