#TheGallery: Morning

Glad to have Tara back with a theme of morning. Here is my take on it with a photographic journal of my morning today:

First of all I had to wake my sleeping angels:

Then I enjoyed the lovely view whilst I made breakfast and put together the children's packed lunches:

A quick whizz to do school run and a top up shop before walking into Kendal for my weekly coffee morning and church cell group:

Finally I walked to work partly along the banks of the River Kent:

Victorian Post Box

Time for a bit of an explanation about my Silent Sunday post this week:

This a Victorian post box located behind St George's Church in Kendal. Regular followers of my bilpfoto account or my Flickr photostream will know that I've been trying to find and photograph as many variants of the traditional British red post boxes from my local area as I can find! Yes I am a bit of a geek but I just love this iconic bit of street furniture... 


Capturing this Victorian one actually made me think about the stories it could tell in well over a century of use. Not only would locals have sent mail to others but how many tourist postcards have passed through that slit? One of my subscribers on blipfoto was also thinking along the same lines:


I love postboxes and it's awesome finding an old one like this and, as you say, imagining all the items of post it must have carried over the years - call-up papers, birthday cards, embroidered postcards from The Front, lots of envelopes with penny blacks and penny reds, six different royal heads on stamps (including the uncrowned king) - if I've totted up correctly. Maybe even packages containing Kendal mintcake. (Preferably addressed to moi!) ;-)

~ PicturePoems

It seems I am not the only one who is a big fan of their red shininess:

1. The institution that is the red letter box! How Fab!

   ~ legalalien

2. These are wonderful pieces of street furniture. We're demolishing whole buildings and tower blocks built postwar and yet these things can still be found. Great shot.

   ~ PossMan

#SilentSunday 25/06/11

A British Icon

A few weeks ago I started capturing photographs of Royal Mail post boxes for my blipfoto daily challenge. It has amazed both myself and others just what a variety of post boxes there are in existence. I haven't yet had a chance to photograph a Victorian one I've been told about but all of the ones above have been captured in and around Kendal and range from George V to George VI and Elizabeth II. They come in a variety of shapes and these days materials. Sometimes its the setting that they are in that makes them so photogenic.

What other things scream out their Britishness to you? For other countries what are the iconic bits of street furniture.