PostboxMap

After Queen Elizabeth II died, I started paying more attention to postboxes.

Not as a planned hobby. I wanted to see where King Charles boxes would appear, which older ones would stay, and what a street-level timeline of British history looked like if you actually walked it.

Once you start looking, you cannot stop. Victorian wall boxes. Edwardian pillars. George V everywhere. The occasional Edward VIII.

Each box carries the royal cypher of the monarch when it was installed. Ordinary street furniture and a history lesson at the same time.

I wanted somewhere to record finds with photos, cypher, and type, designed for standing on a pavement with a phone. I could not find that, so in 2023 I built PostboxMap: https://postboxmap.co.uk

The first version, and then nothing

v1 was simple and fun. It was also fragile. The host moved servers and we lost the data. Not a graceful migration. Just gone.

That was the push. If this was going to continue, it needed moderation, durable storage, and a real community contribution flow. The current site is that rebuild (v2). The product people use now took shape properly in early 2026; the idea started three years earlier.

What "properly" turned out to mean

A map of pins is easy. A map people trust is not.

Duplicates, bad photos, misread cyphers, strong opinions about rare boxes. If you open the gates and walk away, the dataset turns to soup.

So v2 grew review queues, corrections, scoring, Field Mode for offline-ish capture on walks, and Sorting Office for community verification. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a weekend project and something you can leave running.

Problems I did not see coming

1. Scale. Even a few thousand pins will melt a phone browser if you are careless. Making the map feel boring-smooth took a lot of quiet evenings. 2. Moderation. I could review everything myself until I could not. Humans still make the hard calls; the tooling had to stop drowning me. 3. Photos. Pins are numbers. Photos are storage, credit, privacy, and a library that grows faster than you expect. 4. Geography. British-style boxes with UK cyphers exist worldwide. Someone on Mastodon tried to add a George VI pillar from the Falklands and got stuck. They were right. I was wrong.

Where it is now

About 13,500 moderated postboxes and about 12,500 photos on a free community map, with an API, identification guides, Android on Google Play, and a couple of hundred actual contributors. Still nowhere near 100,000 UK boxes. That is fine. The point is a public, searchable record with photos, not a private directory.

Ads and tips help cover servers. Not profitable; enough to keep the lights on.

What I am stuck on

Outside my own site and social accounts, almost nobody links or talks about PostboxMap yet. Adjacent communities are active (OSM postbox mappers, #PostboxSaturday, Letter Box Study Group world, local heritage projects), but discovery is thin.

Question for IH: if you have grown a niche, place-based, non-SaaS product without looking like spam, what actually worked? Warm intros, one strong story, directories, something else?

Happy to answer anything about the rebuild, moderation, maps at this scale, or the weird politics of making public what some people prefer kept private.