Editing Pillar box (section)

===Moving towards a standard design===

Standardisation of sorts came in 1857 with the deliberations of the Committee for Science & Art of the [[House of Lords]]. The committee designed a very ornate box festooned with Grecian-style decoration but, in a major oversight, devoid of any posting aperture, which meant they were hewn out of the cast iron locally, destroying the aesthetic of the box. Fifty were made for London and the big cities and three survive. One is in Salford Museum, [[Greater Manchester]] and the other two are at the BPMA in London. A similar, much-simplified version has survived painted green by [[An Post]] at the [[Cork Kent railway station]], [[Republic of Ireland|Ireland]]. Also to be found only in Ireland is one of the early boxes, now at the An Post exhibit on the history of the Irish postal service in the General Post Office, [[O'Connell Street]], Dublin. It is the sole surviving "Ashworth" box of 1855 for the Northern District, that included all of the [[Ireland|island of Ireland]].

Prior to 1859 there was no standard colour, although there is evidence that the lettering and royal cypher were sometimes picked out in gold. In 1859, a bronze green colour became standard until 1874. Initially, it was thought that the green colour would be unobtrusive. Too unobtrusive, as it turned out&nbsp;– people kept walking into them. Red became the standard colour in 1874, although ten more years elapsed before every box in the UK had been repainted.