Focus on The Post Office

The Royal Mail Archive includes a file on the Post Office in Shifnal (now part of Telford), which is close to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum site. This document is helping, along with items from Ironbridge and the BPMA, to recreate a working sub post office of the period. The Post Office will also share its premises with a working stationers, as was common practice for the time.

The Post Office in Victorian times was the heart of any community, offering a vital way to communicate via postal services, telegraphs and eventually telephones. You will be able to find out more about many of these services when the Post Office opens.

As well as a Post Office and stationers, a Postman will also be welcomed to Blists Hill Victorian Town. This ‘postie’ will be based on a real worker identified from the records of The Royal Mail Archive, and his uniform will be created using references from both there, and the BPMA collection.

The Post Office in the Community

Above the Post Office, the BPMA are working with Nick Bell Design on developing a fantastic new exhibition looking at the role of the Post Office in the community. Moving away from the Victorian era, this will be a contemporary exhibition looking at all periods of history, and use many objects from the extensive BPMA collection.

This will be a unique opportunity to see so many pieces from the collection in one place. These will include the Hen & Chick, a pentacycle originally invented and patented by Edward Burstow, an architect, from Horsham, Sussex in 1882. Postal officials at Horsham tried out these cycles for both postal and telegraph delivery work. Although the centre-cycle did not prove popular elsewhere, the Horsham postal workers wrote a letter of appreciation to Mr Burstow, praising the pentacycle.

There will also be a BSA Bantam in the exhibition and this make is probably the most well-known motorcycle that the Post Office used. They were used for both telegraph and letter work. Bantams were first purchased in 1948 and ceased to be produced in 1971.