Unusual Objects – an occasional series

posted in: Uncategorized | 3

Whilst surveying to collect data your day might be enlivened by spotting something out of the ordinary which might be of some interest or amusement to fellow mappers.  (Sharing with family or friends usually just confirms their view of your strangeness!)

So here’s one I spotted in North Birmingham

Dovedale Road Perry CommonWhy is this unusual? British pillar boxes (post boxes for depositing mail for non-UK readers) are usually painted bright red which has given rise to the generic marketing name of “Pillar Box Red” for pigments in a wide range of consumer goods.

Why this one is painted pink and who painted it are mysteries.

I know of only two other colour variants for Royal Mail pillar boxes:

The first is gold for some pillar boxes to celebrate the London 2012 Olympics ( are they all mapped in OSM I wonder?)

The second are the ones painted green in Ireland after independence (are they still there, or have they been replaced in a wave of modernisation?)

 

3 Responses

  1. SK53

    Pink Postboxes seem to be quite common in the news: they appear to be a transient phenonomen as part of refurbishment of postboxes: the pink colour being a primer layer.

    Windsor probably has more different coloured post boxes than anywhere I can think of:

    * A Blue Airmail box outside the castle (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/403630)
    * A (replica?) Penfold box inside the former station (now shopping), colour a bit hard to describe (https://flic.kr/p/qUaAyf)
    * A murky green one near the town hall (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/69418)

    and there are plenty of gold postboxes along the Thames Valley because of the number of local rowers (certainly boxes in Maidenhead & Henley).

    See for http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/eSq boxes with colour already mapped on OSM (including one or two red ones)

  2. Fred Bann

    There’s one painted blue outside the Air & Space Hall of Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry (MOSI). It has a brass plaque on the side to explain – read the comment on https://flic.kr/p/e3DJmK

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