The power of postcodes
Find your way around a fascinating exhibition.
The invention of postcodes is something you might not have thought about, but those letters and numbers revolutionised the way mail was delivered. Today, every UK location has a postcode – a few letters and numbers in a particular order that show where a place is. However, the exhibition Sorting Britain: The Power of Postcodes at London’s Postal Museum reveals this was not always the case.
In the early 19th century, working out how much it cost to send a letter was based on how many pages it contained and the distance it would travel. The receiver also had to pay for it, so getting lots of birthday cards could be very expensive. Fortunately, in 1840, Sir Rowland Hill sim simplified the postal system and the world’s first o official postage stamps were issued – so the sender now paid for the postage in advance. However, there was no standard form for addresses. People would often describe a letter’s destination as best they could, such as: “To my sister Jean, up the Canongate, down a close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg”. To make sorting the mail easier, Hill divided London up into 10 postal districts, each with its own code. Other cities in the UK soon did the same thing. The first modern postcodes were introduced in Norwich, England, in 1959, before being brought in across the whole country in the 1960s. These allowed machines to sort the post quicker than by hand. One of these early machines, ELSIE, is on display for the first time in 20 years as part of the exhibition. The show explores the clever ideas that changed how letters and parcels were collected, sorted and delivered. Visitors to the exhibition can also go for a ride on the Mail Rail train, a 100-year-old underground railway system that was used to move post around London.
Sorting Britain: The Power of Postcodes is on at the Postal Museum in London until 1 January 2023. To find out more about what’s on at the museum and how to book tickets, visit tinyurl.com/TWJ-postcode