Southbourne: old and new postbox collection plates
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Southbourne: old and new postbox collection plates by Chris Downer as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Southbourne: old and new postbox collection plates
Image: © Chris Downer Taken: 26 Dec 2008
The collection plate on the right is the old-style one. The yellow patch is visible from a fair distance and denoted a Sunday collection (this box being outside a post office). However, from 26 October 2007, Sunday collections were discontinued. A Postwatch survey suggested that only about 4% of the population valued this relatively expensive-to-run service. (The sticker bottom-left of this plate would have been affixed during the run-up to that date, stating that Sunday collections would not occur thereafter.) These collection plates were then gradually replaced by those on the left, in Royal Mail's new typeface and giving equal prominence in print size to both weekday and Saturday collections. Quite how one of these was overlooked is quite difficult to fathom; perhaps just one new plate per box was produced and they forgot to remove the other.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
50.726487
Longitude
-1.81676