London Postal Museum

My wife Jen and I went to the London Postal Museum today. It's a smallish museum but very good, with the emphasis on postal history more than stamps though there is a room with some displays relating to stamps. Among the exhibits are postal conveyances, things relating to the Post Office role in the two World Wars, and films produced by the General Post Office Film Unit - including the most famous, with a text largely by W H Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. You can ride on a small section of the underground rail network that, up to 2003, was used to take mail around London. The Museum is very good - and very digestible.

Here is a picture of an early 1930s pillar box reserved for air mail, and hence painted blue rather than the standard red. I am sure these were only positioned in London and maybe one or two other big cities. And I don't think they were around for many years: I don't remember seeing any when I visited my grandmother in central London in the early 1950s.






SaveSave

I really really want to go there. I have found myself being drawn to postal history.