27 Dec 2024
With just days to go before this year’s festive postbox toppers are removed, organisers are still waiting to hear whether they’ve succeeded in breaking a record.
This year’s St Albans Postboxes campaign has been the busiest yet.
Going for a world record involved a logistical challenge, displaying more than 100 of the woolly masterpieces in the wonderful Holiday Inn Express – and the team are still anxiously awaiting a decision.
Local businesses stepped up – with the last ones joining mid-December – and have thrown their support behind the campaign, getting the fundraising off to an impressive start with more than £13K donated.
Once the toppers were up, the community rose to the challenge and their donations started to arrive. Despite various setbacks, including a couple of toppers disappearing, and others (including the popular Minions and the pigs in blankets) severely damaged and needed to be repaired and replaced, the team worked tirelessly to ensure that anyone out looking for one of the 92 toppers was very unlikely to find a bare, naked postbox.
The toppers are full of staples, wire, glue and other nasties, and should never be seen as toys – their job really is to sit securely on top of a postbox. Hopefully for many Decembers to come!
The team were further distressed and frustrated to learn that a person was seen driving up to toppers and snipping off the tags.
Each tag has an explanation of what the toppers are for and the charities being supported this year, so it was very upsetting to find that someone was deliberately removing these, and possibly losing potential donations for Up on Downs and Gaddesden Place Riding for the Disabled. As fast as the team could reprint and replace, the tags would be removed again.
As ever, the team have tried to focus on the overwhelming positives of the annual yarnbombing extravaganza – joy, smiles, wonderful photos, and of course the money raised. The total of donations at the time of writing is £23,473.90.
The cartographer behind the accompanying map of their locations, as featured in the St Albans Times, was Clare Seldon.
Clare’s interest in maps dates back to her geography A-level, when she discovered that there was a profession which involved making them.
She explained: “I went on to study physical geography and cartography at Oxford Brookes University and joined the British Cartographic Society (BCS) to further my learning of the industry. I have been a volunteer with the BCS for over 20 years and promote better mapping to anyone interested in maps, and I also lecture at UEL on cartographic design principles.
“I have mostly worked creating maps in the transport sector since leaving university and have contributed to some local planning and cycle projects across Hertfordshire. In my personal time I have created secondary school catchment maps to show local parents approximately where a catchment circle would lie around a school, to help when choosing their homes, or indeed what schools they are most likely to get in to. The eagle-eyed amongst your readers may have noticed that I use that same base map for the St Albans Postboxes maps!”
In creating a map, she tends to use Open Source, which allows for free use alongside an acknowledgement of its origin. Very high detail large scale is usually still copyrighted, and only available through council agreements or purchasing directly, but there are a few options for road level or smaller scale data like OS Open Data or OpenStreetMap.
Clare was keen to use her experience to help St Albans Postboxes: “I helped make a topper in 2021 and have seen the great work Candy, Clare and the team do for local charities and wanted to help raise the profile and engagement of the campaign to help raise more money.”
She is also passionate about improving local wayfinding signage: “I have worked on many wayfinding projects across the world – including Legible London, TO360 in Toronto and Plus15 in Calgary – and unfortunately our current signage in St Albans is very poorly maintained and out of date.
“These systems should act as an information source and support exploration of our beautiful city, but they are currently warped, out of date and illegible, giving a very poor impression to visitors to our lovely parks and city centre.
“I have raised it with my local councillor a few times since July and I am awaiting further instruction as to how I can support them in making them fit for purpose and reflect the excellent facilities we have in our city.
“I have recently set up my own business at www.eventmaps.co.uk and starting that up with support from our local enterprise agency STANTA has been very rewarding and they are so encouraging! I am so pleased to have a great network available to me in St Albans to help me navigate this part of my career.”
You can still donate to the postboxes campaign via the following link: https://donate.giveasyoulive.com/fundraising/st-albans-postboxes-2024
