Where’s your postal pride?

I have – in the past – spoken of the ‘plight’ of less-prestigious pillar boxes around the city of Bath. If you are a rare Victorian box in classy Great Pulteney Street you get a regular coat of fresh paint to look your best for the tourists.

Contrast that with the poor old pillar box on London Street – outside the rank of antique shops. Having illustrated its sad state someone came along and took off the old stamp box that was clamped to it – but nothing has been done towards repainting it – although it is still in use.

Now regular Bath Newseum follower Tony Howells has mentioned another sad – and now unused – postal relic from a previous monarch’s reign.

In an email he says:

“Enclosed is an image of a postbox in Larkhall, just next to the ironmongers. Clearly, it is no longer in use, principally as there is another box some yards away. As you can see, it is in a DISGRACEFUL state, like so many others in this town.

Not long ago, in this fair land of ours, the red postboxes were emblematic: they represented a postal system of which we were all (fairly) proud. True, it wasn’t the most efficient business in the land, but it was a national postal system.

The boxes were all smartly painted, the postmen wore smart uniforms.

Now, it has been privatised. Many of the post boxes are dirty, tatty, unpainted, and fungoidal.

Economist John Galbraith once talked about ‘private wealth and public squalor’ and  never was a truer word spoken.

We have potholes in road, worn out road markings, a collapsing infrastructure, and a large number of people driving around in brand new BMWs, Mercs, Shoguns, Range Rovers, Jaguars et al.”

Interesting point of view there Tony – what do others think?