Red pillar boxes to be conserved through heritage stamp of approval

Britain's 113,000 post boxes, those obdurate pillars of the community which first appeared in Jersey in 1852, have been deemed suitable cases for conservation in the new millennium by English Heritage and the Post Office.

Under a new joint agreement, English Heritage will no longer face the palaver of listing rarer types of post boxes. All letter boxes will now be repainted at least once every three years, have damage repaired and flyposting or graffiti removed. "We want to keep these historic boxes in operation," said Catherine Hollingsworth, a Royal Mail spokeswoman. "This is an active recycling policy."

This is particularly good news for Britain's oldest pillar box at Barnes Cross, Bishop's Caundle, Dorset; and for the miniature wall box at the entrance of Charles Dickens's old home at Gads Hill, near Gravesend in Kent. Both were in place before 1860, two decades after the penny post was introduced, and at a time when postal traffic was minuscule compared to the current annual torrent of 21 billion items.

Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of English Heritage, described traditional red pillar boxes as "classic icons of British design". Their beginnings lay with the novelist Anthony Trollope, who originally worked for the Post Office. In 1852 he had the idea of post boxes after researching mail collection in the Channel Islands. Within eight years, Britain boasted a network of 2,000 letter boxes. But Trollope's brainwave was not quite original: according to Avice Harms, of the Letter Box Study Group, a one-off appeared at Wakefield in 1809 at a time when letters were usually handed to "receiving houses".

The original stumpy cast-iron boxes were highly useful but pug-ugly. The route to icon status began in 1866 when the architect J W Penfold began to put on the style, designing a hexagonal box crowned with an acorn. The "Penfold" came in three sizes and was used for more than a decade, first painted green, and later red to improve visibility.

The stolid scarlet sentinel arrived in 1879 and, by the time Queen Victoria died in January 1901 there were more than 33,000 pillar, lamp and wall boxes. When air mail services began in 1930, sky-blue boxes became the container of choice, and in 1939, with the fear of attacks, the tops of pillar boxes were given a coat of green or khaki paint as camouflage.

These practical developments failed in one very peculiar respect: until 11 years ago, the words "Royal Mail" did not appear on pillar boxes, a point missed even when the Type K box, designed by Tony Gibbs, was introduced in 1979. He was too busy drawing up its anti-vandal "dragon's teeth" and letter-bomb plate.

The solid burghers of Grahamstown, South Africa, may find such details riveting. They use the country's oldest pillar box – a red, fluted number nearly 160 years old. Just one problem with the box: the posting slot was 8 feet high – and even then letters were stolen by Dickensian "hookers" and "dippers".