There’s a rare sight in Manchester, just off the hustle and bustle of Deansgate, which thousands of Mancunians stroll past every day without batting an eyelid.
The rare sight itself is hardly jaw-dropping: It’s a pillar box, like you see all across the land. But this post box is painted a striking shade of sky blue.
And, despite several similar boxes appearing in the last few years, there is only one other pillar box like the Liverpool Road one still on the streets of the UK. The other is directly outside Windsor Castle.
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The sky blue box used to signify a special 'air mail' postal service in the inter-war period, explained Robert Cole, a member of The Letter Box Study Group.
“The post office set up letter boxes in 1862 but in the 1920s this exciting thing came around called an aeroplane,” he said. “They were able to charge more for air mail, so it was an opportunity really.
"They put up special boxes and had special vans that were sky blue and a huge advertising campaign from that time. It was like adverts today for super-fast broadband. It was not that all new post boxes were blue, just some of them in city centre sites and they were special.”
Manchester has one to commemorate this air mail service, introduced by Royal Mail in 1911. However, this isn't its original livery.
The 'type B' pillar box on Liverpool Road, bearing the monogram of George VI started out in life like any other red box, but was repainted in 1983 to commemorate the links between the Post Office and Britain's aviation industry. That was the year the city's Aerospace Museum opened.
This box is the descendant of three other blue air mail boxes Manchester had in the 1930s, none of which survive. “There was one outside Whitworth Street post office, one outside St Peter’s post office, and another at the Newton Street post office,” Postal Museum senior curator Corinne Galloway told the MEN. “One was unique because it was built into the wall, but I’m not sure which one that was.”
A number of other blue postboxes have appeared since 1983.
In 2019, a smattering of red post boxes were painted a royal blue shade to celebrate England hosting the Cricket World Cup, including one in Nottingham. Meanwhile, others were painted a mid-blue hue to say 'Thank You' to NHS and social care staff at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020.
But the only two boxes with an air mail link in situ are at Liverpool Road, Manchester, and Windsor Castle - with the latter being the only original air mail post box which has remained blue in the same position since the 1930s. So why was the scheme halted?
Oddly, it is because it was popular. Really popular. So popular, in fact, that it caused Royal Mail bosses to overhaul the way they processed post — as Corinne explained.
“There was this idea that they wanted to promote people using the service and there was a functional question, too,” she continued. “Before they were brought in you had to separate air mail from domestic mail by hand. It was thought by having a separate post box that would help with separating and delivery of air mail.
“By the end of the 1930s, there was a change in the way that mail was processed. It became more work to have a separate function. They announced the end of the blue post boxes in 1938 and they went out in 1939.
“That’s where they are quite rare. There were only ever 300 and most were removed or repainted red.”
And so, the memory of blue post boxes slowly faded away as time passed — until the 1980s. It appears that despite air mail boxes having long gone out of use by that time, and the Liverpool Road box never having been one, it was repainted to celebrate the opening of its neighbour, the Aerospace Museum, in 1983.
Now, Manchester's post box bears a commemorative plate on the rear side, which says: "This box is painted blue to represent the special 'air mail' boxes erected in Great Britain between 1930-38.
"It commemorates not only the long association of the Post Office with British aviation but also our support for the Manchester Aerospace Museum." It is signed by then then head postmaster P.J. Howarth, and dated November 1983.
Two years later, the Aerospace Museum merged with the Science and Industry Museum, and welcomed visitors until its closure in 2021, when the Lower Campfield Market was redeveloped.
Even with so few air mail boxes left, one can get a vivid picture of how they were used, Robert concluded.
“The Manchester one is one of the better known ones,” he said. “It’s a really, really lovely piece of post box history. You can imagine things about who posted things through them and what sort of life they had.”
And it also signifies the change the country went through in the early 20th Century, and from the end of the war to now, Corinne believes. She said: “We take it for granted today that something can go all over the world in minutes. Back then it was revolutionary.”
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