Upton on Severn, Worcestershire

A Ludlow in Worcestershire

The previous post about pillar boxes seemed to attract a lot of interest, so, although I’ve not managed to pass an Edward VIII post box recently, here’s a letter box with the monogram of his brother, George VI.

There have been wall boxes, post boxes set into the walls of Post Offices or into all kinds of other walls in the countryside, since Victorian times, and I don’t normally give them too much attention. But this one caught my eye because of the unusual enamel plate. Jonathan Glancey’s good little book Pillar Boxes (1989) tells me that this is what’s known as a Ludlow box, manufactured by James Ludlow of Birmingham, a company that supplied non-standard wall boxes from the late-19th century until the firm closed in 1965. Their boxes have a white enamel plate and no rain hood over the letter slot. The body of the box is not cast iron, like most post boxes, but is made of wood with a covering of sheet metal.

Perhaps the lighter body and the tendency for the enamel plates to come away from the front have made Ludlow boxes slightly less durable than their cast-iron counterparts. But it was good to find this one, still accepting mail and still catching the eye with its businesslike enamel panel.