27 Oct 2025
It’s not quite the house that crochet built, but you’d be hard pressed to find another home where wool is one of the dominant decorating materials.
From the Halloween wreath on the front door, to knitted pot plants and a mounted deer head, there are a lot of handcrafted crochet accoutrements, and that’s before taking into account the vast amount of festive postbox toppers which take up shelves of storage space.
That includes a giant Snoopy sleeping on his iconic red doghouse, which already has pride of place in the living room of Candy Stuart’s family home, despite it only being October.
As half of the team heading up the creative side of St Albans Postboxes campaign, now in its eighth year, Candy spends a rather lot of her time thinking about Christmas.
Alongside Lucy Dronfield, their roles involve sorting, creating, cleaning and restoring toppers over the course of 11 months ready for their seasonal turn in the spotlight.
Although the crocheted creations are only on display for a few weeks, what happens behind the scenes reveals a military operation held together by a lot of spreadsheets.
After the invariably very soggy toppers come down on December 31 – “We like to bring them in before New Year’s Eve because things tend to get a bit hairy then,” Candy explains – they are dried out before being put into storage around March.
“We usually do a stock take as we bring them in to decide which ones need work – some of them are OK and just get put away until Christmas.
“The plate of mince pies for example, has been going out since Day One, untouched for years, but it’s getting a little bit of a spruce up with some fresh holly this year.”
The majority of the toppers use manmade polyurethane materials, so even if they get wet they are pretty resilient, although those positioned under trees often need clearing of twigs and bird mess. As a charity, they don’t buy any of the materials, and all the yarnbombers donate their own wool and other materials.
“Sometimes we take old toppers apart and remake them if they’re falling apart or the characters on them haven’t survived the season.”
After last year’s Guinness World Records triumph – which saw the team creating the largest ever display of textile postbox toppers with 102 on show – they’re aiming for even more in 2025.
“To get the extra postboxes we’re going onto the little boxes on posts, and more of the modern ones, so we’re expanding onto different shapes because we’ve run out of the normal ones.”
The campaign has seen fresh makers stepping forwards every year: “We’ve got a group from the St Albans Hong Kong Society doing a Hong Kong scene at The Quadrant and one themed around food outside Sainsbury’s.”
The work of St Albans Postboxes team is not just restricted to the city, and can be seen in Harpenden, London Colney, Redbourn, Smallford, Tyttenhanger, Colney Heath, outside Childwickbury Lodge and on the way to Hatfield, but they will never encroach onto the territory of neighbouring groups like the one in Hemel.
As you might expect, there is fierce competition for particular locations, with some groups holding on tightly to the postboxes they have topped for years, like the Clock Tower, Tesco in St Peter’s Street and Holywell Hill.
“We try to accommodate what people want. We’ve got someone who asked to do the Portland Arms, another lady who lives in Park Street who likes to do that one, and Jefferson Crafts like the one outside the Howard Pharmacy.”
Many of the designs remain top secret until they’re finished, including the one from regulars the Sopwell Knitters, previously responsible for woolly versions of the Cathedral and Clock Tower.
“Sopwell always creates something amazing. They meet on a Monday night in the pub to knit and crochet, but it’s always top secret.”
Apart from keeping to the Christmas theme, there are really no restrictions on toppers, so this year will see Santa lost on safari, the Grinch and possibly some K-Pop Demon Hunters following a suggestion by the editor’s youngest daughter.
“We’ll see what we can do,” promises Candy.
“There’s one I’m not allowed to mention, but I think the Hong Kong ones are going to be amazing because we’ve seen their designs and we’ve seen the standard of their work.
“The WI have made a carousel which they’re hoping they can make turn, and we’re hoping for lots of lights as well.”
Of course, there’s always a downside to any act of community spirit, and various postbox toppers have been stolen, vandalised and even torched over the years.
“A lot of it is just pure vandalism. Probably lads coming back from the pub going, ‘oh this will be a laugh, let’s tear this apart and throw it around in people’s gardens’. I think we only lost two or three last year, which out of 92 is not bad. When they do go missing we find out pretty quickly, and often they turn up somewhere when people get them home and realise that they’re absolutely sopping wet, probably quite sticky, and all glued together with wires stuck up everything!”
As you might imagine, it’s something of a logistical nightmare to coordinate: “Every year we’re kind of like, ‘why are we doing this?’ and then the charity money starts coming in and you think, oh yes, that’s why.
“There’s a lot of spreadsheets and ticking things off and making sure everybody’s got what they want and I haven’t stuck something in the wrong place. It was quite easy to start off with when there were only 24, but the whole thing got a bit out of hand, and now it’s a St Albans tradition and we cannot let people down!”
