A familiar, if now somewhat sadly underused piece of street furniture, is the post box, of which, according to The Letter Box Study Group, there are around 800 different types, including more than 400 different varieties of pillar box, around 160 types of wall box, 66 Ludlow Boxes, and almost 80 versions of the lamp box. The introduction of the Uniform Penny Post by Rowland Hill in 1840 opened up the postal system to almost everybody in the United Kingdom and the increased use of the system meant that the old ways of posting letters, either by taking them personally to a Receiving House or giving them to a perambulating, uniformed Bellman who alerted residents to his presence by ringing a bell, were becoming unable to cope with the demand.

To solve the problem Anthony Trollope, the novelist but then a Surveyor Clerk at the Post Office, proposed the introduction of roadside post boxes, which he had seen while travelling in France and Belgium. On November 23, 1852 a trial began in Jersey with the installation of four red, cast-iron pillar boxes and it was extended the following year to Guernsey.  

The trial having been considered a success, from 1853 post boxes began to be installed on the mainland, the first in Carlisle. Local surveyors had the responsibility for the design, manufacture, and installation of them with the result that there was no standard design. By 1857, however, it was settled that the aperture through which a letter was posted should be horizontal rather than vertical and later that it should be under a slightly protruding cap to protect it from the rain.

In 1859 the colour of the boxes was standardised with green chosen to ensure that they blended in with the surroundings and did not appear to be obtrusive. The problem was that many people could not find them, or at least they claimed, and eventually yielding to public pressure, the colour of letter boxes was standardised once more with a return to the original red in 1874. It took ten years to complete the task of repainting them.

Irrespective of the shape and design of our local post boxes, they contain a Royal Cipher and/or the words “Post Office”. However, the post box outside No78, Banbury Road, the home of the lexicographer, James Murray, which was installed in 1885 to handle the volume of correspondence he was generating, has neither. It is what is known as an “anonymous” post box and is the result of a design error.

From 1879 Andrew Handyside and Company, an iron founders from Derby, had responsibility for manufacturing a new design of post box with its familiar cylindrical shape replacing the previous hexagonal design. Unfortunately, during the manufacture neither the royal cipher, at the time “VR”, nor the Post Office’s name were incorporated into the design. Perhaps because it was a new design or the roll-out was conducted at a leisurely pace astonishingly it took eight years for the mistake to be spotted and for new boxes to be fitted once more with the cipher and the Post Office’s name.

The post box outside of Murray’s house is one of the relatively few “anonymous” post boxes still in existence, making the seemingly unassuming Oxford suburban house even more remarkable.