simont | They've uprooted my postbox!

Yesterday I got a travel brochure through the door addressed to a previous occupant. So I stuck a ‘return to sender’ label on it, and left it by the front door to repost the next time I went out. Today I left the house to go to work; I picked up the brochure on the way, and walked four houses down the street to the incredibly convenient nearby postbox.

Or rather, to where the postbox used to be. It's vanished, with not even an obvious scar where it was uprooted. I stood and stared at the empty space for a couple of minutes, unable to believe I hadn't just made a silly mistake of some sort.

Bah! Suddenly the niceness of the location of my house has gone down. Not that the convenient postbox contributed at all to my purchase decision – I didn't even notice it was there until after completion – but I've been finding it thoroughly useful while it was there, and now they've taken it away. Humph.

(So now I need to find my next nearest postbox. A quick google turns up four or five websites which purport to be able to show me a map of where all the nearest postboxes are to a given location; but they're all rubbish as far as I can tell, and in particular they all have incomplete data.)

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This may be of use or at least of interest... (http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/)

That was one of the ones I found, yes. I think it was the best of the bunch, but I'm pretty sure I know of at least one postbox it doesn't show (I'll find out for sure at lunchtime), and given that I have specific knowledge of about five postboxes in total that's not a good hit rate.

I'm also suspicious of the fact that it doesn't show my just-vanished one. That either makes it bang up to date or even more incomplete, and I think I'd bet on the latter...

But thanks :-)

Ah, it did look as though Cambridge was fairly well covered, sorry if it's not helpful after all.

Would be good if you could submit the locations you know about, though (if you don't mind that knowledge being in the public domain)! :)

Yes; I plan to walk past my suspected postbox on my way to lunch, and if it's there as I think I remember it being then I'll look into adding it.

OK that's bizarre, I put my postcode in, but the postbox nearest me isn't either a) on the map or b) in the list of postcodes/addresses available to put on the map! There should be one on Macaulay Avenue and one on Hinton Way but neither are there!

I think I'll see if I can contact the author!

I'll be seeing him on Thursday! The data on the site was gathered by putting in a couple of FOI requests to the royal mail (eg, http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/last_collection_times ) - perhaps its time for an updated FOI request...

Ha, small world. He replied anyway, and I've promised to try remember to go look at the serial numbers on the postboxes in question.

At some point I gave up, and admitted that if I waited until I got round to going to the post-box, it would take weeks, and that work had an outgoing-mail box into which one could deposit personal paid/stamped mail, and even if it took a day to get it to work, and then it made its way down to reception after the post left, it would be quicker than remembering to go to the post-box myself :)

Yes, I'm fairly sure my office has an outgoing-mail box which I could use if I wanted to. I probably would be willing to use it for actual letters I'd written and stamped, if it weren't for the fact that I think it's in the other building and hence actually further out of my way than the postbox I (hope I) go past on my way to buy lunch.

I'm not sure I'd be as comfortable with dropping things into that which were labelled "not known at this address". Somehow I feel as if I should take the responsibility myself of putting things like that into an actual postbox. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it's a combination of the idea that if it doesn't successfully get back to the Royal Mail the resulting inconvenience is borne by somebody else rather than me (giving me a greater responsibility to personally make sure it does), and the fact that it hasn't got a stamp on it in the normal sense (and so somebody checking through the work outbox might have to stop and think about it and perhaps reject it on grounds of excessive weirdness).

OpenStreetMap seems reasonably good at this (zoom in to one of the closest two levels). I don't know if their data is imported or if mappers add it. It certainly has the few I know of in Cambridge.

You might find that www.geograph.org.uk is the best resource for this ... and any that are missing can easily be added [tempt, tempt]

stretten av, akeman st cross roads?

There is a very spiky one (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bugshaw/2813805398/) near the river.

They've uprooted my postbox!

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