Every British post box carries the cypher of the monarch who reigned when it was made. OpenStreetMap's volunteers have mapped 90,190 UK boxes and read the cypher on 61,435. So which kings and queens are still out on our streets, and how old is the box at the end of your road?
Look at the door of a pillar box and, just under the slot, you will usually find two or three letters and a crown. VR for Victoria Regina. GR for George V. EIIR for Elizabeth II. A post box keeps the cypher of the reign in which it was cast, so the street is a museum that nobody curates: a Victorian wall box in a village lane, a George V pillar outside a 1920s parade, a Charles III box on a new estate.
OpenStreetMap, the free map built by volunteers, records post boxes with a tag for the royal cypher. I took every UK box in it on 28 October 2026, sorted them by reign and asked three questions. How many of each reign survive, and where? Can the boxes on a town's streets tell you when the town was built? And how much of this is the map, rather than the boxes?
Type a town, village or postcode, or use your location. I list the nearest mapped box from each reign and pick out the oldest one within a kilometre. Then go and look: the cypher is on the door, and OpenStreetMap's mappers would welcome a correction if it is wrong.
How likely are you to have a Victorian box nearby? Of the 1,426 towns and cities in OS Open Names, 376 (26%) have a mapped VR box within a kilometre of the point that marks their centre, and the typical town is 3.7 km from one. Stornoway, in the Western Isles, is the furthest: 138 km. These are mapped boxes, so some towns will have a Victorian box that nobody has tagged yet.
Elizabeth II dominates. Of the 61,435 boxes with a cypher, 36,452 (59%) carry EIIR. Her reign lasted seventy years and spanned the great expansion of the network, and every box replaced in that time got her cypher. George V comes second with 9,809, then George VI with 4,718, Scotland's crown with 3,963, Victoria with 3,614 and Edward VII with 2,663. Charles III has 73 mapped so far; the first box with his cypher was unveiled at Great Cambourne in Cambridgeshire on 12 July 2024.
Counts flatter long reigns, so here is the same thing per year of each reign. Victoria's boxes had 48 years to be made (the first mainland box went up in Carlisle in 1853), but only 75 survive for each of those years, against 516 a year for Elizabeth II. Partly that is survival: a box on a busy street gets hit, moved, replaced. Partly it is growth: there were simply fewer boxes in the 1860s. Edward VIII stands out: a reign of eleven months has left 143 mapped boxes, 160 for each year he was king, double Victoria's rate.
The kind of box changes with the reigns too. Victoria's survivors are mostly wall boxes (2,173 of 3,614), set into a wall where nothing could knock them down. Lamp boxes, the small boxes bolted to a post, are mostly Elizabeth II's: 17,073 of the 25,061 mapped lamp boxes.
Edward VIII came to the throne on 20 January 1936 and abdicated on 11 December, before he was crowned. Boxes with his cypher, EVIIIR, are the great prize of postbox spotting. Historic Environment Scotland's listing for one in Glasgow says that 271 letter boxes were made in 1936, 161 of them pillar boxes, and that the Letter Box Study Group has identified 171 surviving. It also notes that after the abdication most of his wall and lamp boxes were given new George VI doors, while the pillar boxes mostly kept theirs.
OpenStreetMap has 143 boxes tagged EVIIIR: 84% of the 171. 135 of them are pillar boxes, which fits the story of the replaced doors. 112 are in England, 28 in Scotland, 2 in Wales and 1 in Northern Ireland. Greater London has 26 and Glasgow 15.
143 boxes for a king who reigned less than a year: twice as many per year as Victoria.
The first roadside boxes in the British Isles went up in Jersey in 1852, on the advice of the novelist Anthony Trollope, then a Post Office surveyor. Mainland Britain followed at Botchergate in Carlisle in 1853. OpenStreetMap now has 3,614 boxes with Victoria's VR: 5.9% of all those with a cypher. 45 of them are tagged as reproduction Penfolds, replicas made at the end of the 1980s that copy the Victorian cypher, so the count of genuine survivors is nearer 3,569.
The map knows some famous ones. Wikipedia says the oldest pillar boxes still in Royal Mail use are a pair at Framlingham in Suffolk, cast by Handyside of Derby in 1856. OpenStreetMap has two octagonal VR pillar boxes within a kilometre of Framlingham's centre. At Golspie in Sutherland, where a VR wall box of 1861 on the front of the inn is thought to be Scotland's oldest, OpenStreetMap has 2 VR boxes within a kilometre of the village.
The most famous Victorian design is the hexagonal Penfold, named after its architect John Penfold and made from 1866 to 1879. Wikipedia says about 300 were made and 150 survive. OpenStreetMap has 82 tagged as Penfolds and 45 as reproductions. Wikidata lists 72 Penfold boxes, mostly from the heritage lists; 67 of them sit within 50 metres of a box in OpenStreetMap, and 65 of those are tagged as Penfolds there. Of the OpenStreetMap "originals", 2 are in Scotland, where Wikipedia says there are none, so a few replicas are probably tagged wrongly.
When the first boxes with Elizabeth II's cypher appeared in Scotland in 1952, some Scots objected: there had never been an Elizabeth I of Scotland. An EIIR pillar box in the Inch district of Edinburgh was tarred, hammered and finally blown up. The Post Office gave way, and from 1953 new boxes in Scotland carried the Crown of Scotland instead of a cypher. Charles III's cypher is not being used in Scotland either.
The map shows how completely that held. Of the post-1952 boxes in Scotland with a cypher recorded, 3,933 carry the Scottish crown and only 39 carry EIIR: 99% crown. Most of the EIIR stragglers are lamp boxes (24). Wikipedia notes one EIIR box put up in Dunoon by mistake in 2018 and scheduled for replacement as soon as it was spotted.
If boxes keep the cypher of the year they were made, the mix of cyphers in a town should say something about when its streets were laid out. A Victorian suburb ought to keep a few VR and EVIIR boxes; a new town of the 1960s should have almost none. I put each box in its 2022 built-up area (ONS) and kept the 131 towns and districts with at least 50 boxes with a cypher and at least 60% of their boxes tagged.
The oldest street furniture is in inner London and the Victorian resorts and spas. In the City of London, 48% of the boxes with a cypher are Victorian or Edwardian; in Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Wandsworth and Camden it is around two in five. Royal Tunbridge Wells, Bournemouth and Cheltenham are the oldest towns outside London and Manchester. At the other end are the post-war new towns, just as the idea predicts: Glenrothes, Stevenage, Crawley, Milton Keynes and Livingston each have no more than two boxes from before 1910.
But the clock is a rough one. Chichester, Newbury and Chelmsford, all old towns, also sit near the bottom: boxes get replaced, and a town that renewed its boxes looks young. Across all 122 towns in England and Wales with a population, bigger towns have a slightly older mix (Spearman's rank correlation 0.31), mostly because the big cities have Victorian cores.
A sharper test needs the town's size before the First World War. For 16 towns I have a 1911 census population from my seaside railways study (from A Vision of Britain through Time). The more of today's population a town already had in 1911, the more of its boxes are Victorian or Edwardian: a rank correlation of 0.63. Bournemouth, Margate and Scarborough keep many old boxes; Aylesbury and Bognor Regis, which have grown more than sevenfold since 1911, have almost none. Sixteen towns is a small sample, mostly resorts, so treat this as a promising sign rather than a proof.
Everything above counts the boxes that volunteers have mapped and tagged, not the boxes that exist. Royal Mail said in 2002 that there were more than 115,000 post boxes in the UK. OpenStreetMap has 90,190, about 78%. Of those, 27,168 (30%) have no cypher tag, so about 61,435 boxes, roughly half of Royal Mail's total, have a known reign.
The gaps are uneven. Among the 76 areas with at least 300 mapped boxes, the share with a cypher tag runs from 30% in County Durham to 100% on the Wirral; the median is 71%. The "How complete?" layer on the map shows it in 20 km squares. Northern Ireland has the fewest mapped boxes and the lowest share tagged.
Does that bias the reign counts? Mappers might record the cypher on an interesting old box and skip a plain modern one. I found little sign of it. In the 9 areas where at least 90% of boxes are tagged, Victorian boxes make up 5.1% of those with a cypher, against 5.9% overall, and boxes from before 1936 23% against 26%. If anything, thoroughly mapped areas are slightly younger. Across areas, the share tagged and the share of old boxes are unrelated (rank correlation -0.02).
Boxes. Every OpenStreetMap object tagged amenity=post_box inside the United Kingdom, read through the QLever OpenStreetMap endpoint on 28 October 2026: 91,456 rows, 90,190 boxes once repeated rows were merged. The royal_cypher tag gives the reign: VR, EVIIR, GR (one box tagged GVR), EVIIIR, GVIR, EIIR, CIIIR and scottish_crown. "No" means the box has no cypher; values such as "yes", "obscured", "crown", "ER" or two cyphers at once are counted as unclear. Box kind comes from post_box:type and Penfolds from post_box:design.
Places. The nearest OS Open Names settlement gives each box its county or unitary area and nation; boxes in Northern Ireland, which OS Open Names does not cover, are found by their position. For towns, each box goes into the 2022 built-up area (ONS) whose centroid is nearest in units of the area's equivalent radius, if within 1.25 radii. I have no built-up area outlines here, so ragged towns lose some outlying boxes and a few boxes land in a neighbour; the town measures are shares, which this affects less than counts. Populations are Census 2021 totals summed from LSOAs.
Reign years. Victoria from 1853 (the first mainland box) to 22 January 1901; Edward VII to 6 May 1910; George V to 20 January 1936; Edward VIII to 11 December 1936; George VI to 6 February 1952; Elizabeth II to 8 September 2022; Charles III boxes from 12 July 2024; the Scottish crown from 1953.
What a cypher means. The cypher dates the casting of the door or box, not the day it was put in the street. Boxes are moved and reused, doors are swapped (most Edward VIII wall and lamp boxes were given George VI doors), and reproduction Penfolds carry Victoria's cypher. Victorian "anonymous" boxes of 1879 to 1887 have no cypher. Royal Mail's figure of 115,000 boxes dates from 2002; I have no current count by area, so I cannot say exactly how complete the map is in each place.
Checks. 229 of the 278 post boxes in Wikidata with coordinates (mostly listed boxes) lie within 50 metres of a box in OpenStreetMap, and 212 of those have a cypher tag. The 1911 test uses census populations from A Vision of Britain through Time, gathered for my seaside railways study, against 2021 built-up areas whose boundaries are not the same as the 1911 parishes and boroughs.