EARLY VICTORIAN

(Backblip) A very early postbox in Framlingham, installed sometime between 1852 and 1859, when the design changed*. I took this in the afternoon while I was out treating myself while B stayed back in the cottage. He'd had guitar withdrawal so we'd gone off in the morning to find a music shop in Ipswich to give him a fix of talking (and trying out) guitars with men in black t-shirts and long grey ponytails. They were great and interesting (especially to B) and it was the shop owner who told us that we'd been in Ed Sheeran's local the day before. We'd had a low expectation of Ipswich, mostly because of an ex-neighbour at our last house who was definitely not a good advertisement for his home town, but the bits we saw were fab! We had excellent coffee and brownies over the road from the music shop then back to the cottage for lunch and out again for me.

*"The 1859 standardised design featured horizontal slots with an overhang, after it was discovered that rain water had a habit of leaking into vertical slots. The previous red colour was replaced after complaints that they were an eyesore in rural locations, with a bronze-green becoming the new norm. As it turned out, these didn’t stand out enough – and thanks to the number of people who walked into them, the original red was reinstated as the standard colour in 1874."

From The History of Letter Boxes on the Postal Museum website.