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Royal Mail

Categories: Transport

Before the 2012 Olympics started the Royal Mail committed to turn a red post box gold for each British Gold medal, Olympic and Paralympic. In the event this meant that over 100 boxes turned colour. Each one is associated with a particular gold medal and has been chosen to be close to the medallist's home town/borough. Here's the map. We don't believe that the Royal Mail despatched an employee with a pot of gold paint the instant the medallist crossed the line but they have said the colour is permanent.

The Royal Mail have their own website of memorials, nationwide: https://www.royalmail.com/memorials/home .

2022: Londonist have posted (ha ha) an excellent page on postboxes

2024: We read a WW2 'Letter from London' by Mollie Panter-Downes with: "Posting a letter has acquired a new interest, too, since His Majesty's tubby scarlet pillar boxes have been done up in squares of yellow detector paint, which changes colour if there is poison gas in the air and is said to be as sensitive as a chameleon." 

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This section lists the memorials created by the subject on this page:
Royal Mail

Creations i

Anthony Trollope - pillar box - Fleet Street

5 similar plaques have been erected.

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Anthony Trollope - pillar box - Piccadilly

This plaque commemorates the bicentenary of the birth of Anthony Trollope (18...

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Anthony Trollope - pillar box - Rutland Gate

5 similar plaques have been erected.

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Anthony Trollope - pillar box - Strand

5 similar plaques have been erected.

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Charlotte Dujardin gold post box

{On plaque attached to side of box:} This post box has been painted gold by R...

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Other Subjects

Enfield school-house / station

Enfield school-house / station

the V&A (our picture source) hold in their collection part of the façade of this building (not just the photo but the bricks themselves). Alamy have a photo of the saved section of the façade e...

Building, Education, Property, Transport

2 memorials
First underground passenger railway - Metropolitan

First underground passenger railway - Metropolitan

Between Paddington and Farringdon. A grand opening on the 9th preceded the opening to the public on Saturday 10 January 1863. “That afternoon Hetta trusted herself all alone to the mysteries of th...

Event, Transport

4 memorials
London and Greenwich Railway

London and Greenwich Railway

The first steam railway to have a terminus in London. Originally it ran, largely on viaducts, between Deptford and Spa Road Bermondsey. By 1838 it had been extended at both ends: from Deptford to G...

Place, Transport

6 memorials
Corporal Harold John Strangward

Corporal Harold John Strangward

Harold John Strangward was born on 30 January 1884 in Marylebone, London, the youngest of the six children of Robert Strangward (1840-1919) and Emily Strangward née Hawkins (1845-1905). His birth w...

Person, Armed Forces, Law, Transport, France, Wales

War dead, WW1
1 memorial

Previously viewed

Sir Joseph Banks

Sir Joseph Banks

From the British Library: "Joseph Banks was a prominent botanist, who served as President of the Royal Society, and advised on the development of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. He was a key figu...

Person, Science

2 memorials