Wall Letter Box to the boundary wall of 1 and 2 Post Office Cottages, Tortworth, South Gloucestershire

Summary

Wall Letter Box. Designed in 1857 by Smith and Hawkes of Birmingham. The boundary wall in which the wall letter box is inserted is of lesser interest.

Description

Wall Letter Box. Designed in 1857 by Smith and Hawkes of Birmingham. The boundary wall in which the wall letter box is inserted is of lesser interest.

MATERIALS: cast-iron, painted red.

DESCRIPTION: a standardised design with a moulded and panelled front. To the top is a horizontal aperture with the words ‘POST OFFICE’ above and ‘LETTER BOX’ below. The original inward-opening flap appears to have been removed. The panel below has the Royal Cypher of Queen Victoria above the words ‘CLEARED AT’, and a modern collection plate has been bolted beneath. The central panel forms the door, and the bottom panel is blind.

History

The postal reforms of Sir Rowland Hill in 1837 and the introduction of the penny post in 1840 led to an increased demand for post offices nationally and, in the 1850s, Post Office Surveyors began visiting villages and hamlets to review the postal arrangements, recommending where post offices, and subsequently post boxes, were needed. The earliest post boxes in the British Isles were of the pillar-box type and were first erected in the Channel Islands in 1852 at the suggestion of the novelist Anthony Trollope, who was a Post Office Surveyor. It became rapidly apparent that smaller letter boxes were needed in villages and other rural locations and specimen wall boxes were made for the surveyor of the Western District of England in 1857 and authorisation was given to site them in villages near Plymouth. None of these earliest wall boxes survive. At the same time a cast-iron wall letter box was being made by Smith and Hawkes for the Birmingham District, and after some improvements were commissioned. The first tranche of 1857 included an inward-opening flap over the horizontal posting aperture but following reports of rain getting inside, a modification of an additional casting in the form of a small pediment and hood over the aperture was introduced. This is believed to have been applied to about 100 of the first standard wall letter boxes. It was not added to the example at Tortworth.

The wall letter box at Tortworth is first labelled on the 1903 Ordnance Survey (OS) map and first referred to in Kelly’s Directory of Gloucestershire, 1906. This reference to the letter box only is thought to coincide with the closure of the post office in the early C20 rather than the installation of the letter box. It is believed that the letter box was installed in 1857. That said, the maps do suggest that the position of the road has changed slightly and the boundary wall, built of stone with cement mortar, is likely to have been rebuilt.

Reasons for Listing

The wall letter box to the boundary wall of 1 and 2 Post Office Cottages is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a rare surviving example of one of the first wall letter boxes designed by Smith and Hawkes of Birmingham and commissioned by the Royal Mail in 1857.

Historic interest:

* for its contribution to our understanding of the development of the postal system in the rural areas of England in the mid-C19;
* it survives well and makes a good contribution to the streetscape as an iconic piece of street furniture.

External Links

Historic England Listing

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