The post box which shows all that is wrong in the UK. This article follows my previous one about the state of public services being sold off. One of the most spectacular is the Post Office itself, closely followed by Royal Mail who owns the above post box.
In our village, we have two or three post boxes. We did have another one, until an out of control car crashed into it, causing quite a lot of damage. Royal Mail decided not to replace it, or repair it. Instead they removed it and simply laid some fresh tarmac. A poor show.
Now I see that our nearest post box has been modernised. It has become a digital post box! Even worse it is modernisation at the expense of our heritage and appreciation of good, solid craftsmanship. The new lid is shiny red plastic and incorporates a small solar panel. The front now has a QR/barcode reader welded on and a door to allow the posting of small parcels. Sometimes old and new styles can work well together but this is absolutely awful, crude and distasteful.
A botched job
While it might be helpful for some folk to post small pre-paid packages in a way which doesn’t involve queuing in a normal Post Office (and I don’t disagree in principle with this), it is a botched job.
There seems to have been absolutely no effort to clean off the dirt and old, peeling paint before respraying it. Furthermore, only the door has been painted, the rest shows decades of a certain patina which does have some charm to it. These old post boxes are part of British history and our culture, with the monarch’s initials shown to denote its age; these things are important.
These post boxes are possibly a forerunner to our Post Office disappearing, just like all of the banks which seem to have disappeared. No doubt it is all to do with “for your convince” and”meeting customer demand” and “providing modern digital services” and “improving efficiency”. It is public vandalism done on-the-cheap and I think it looks awful.
It is shoddy, lazy work done on the cheap. I don’t remember any consultation; it just happened. There’s no appreciation of our culture, no broader accountability of the aesthetic or historical nature of old post boxes. Standards have dropped and the blummin council wouldn’t be interested.
Am I right? Rant almost over. Actually, there’s plenty of other things wrong, so apologies for a slight exaggeration! Normal service to be resumed in the next blog post.