http://www.stampandcoin.co.uk APRIL 2016 17Q&A: Dan Snow
Postal museums are closing all over Europe. Why do you think
the Postal Museum and Mail Rail are bucking the trend?
‘Why? One: because the Royal Mail is the important postal
system in the world and one of the greatest innovators of global
postal systems. The other reason is the enormous respect and
admiration that we have in Britain for our history and cultural
heritage. I’m half Canadian and in Canada, much as I love it, they
don’t have that. Historic buildings, archives, museums – although
we complain and worry about them – are actually in very good
shape. More people visit heritage attractions every weekend
than go to football matches. There is a widely accepted public
perception that this stuff matters, and it does matter. So I’m not
surprised that the Postal Museum is bucking the trends.’People are happy to view national trust properties, art
collections, but social history has been quite a neglected area...
I think that’s probably changing. Traditionally war collections,
stately homes, and high politics was more sought after but
I think we’ve seen a democratisation of heritage. We’ve seen
normal people going to places and, as a result, those places
have morphed into institutions that offer a broader depiction
of the past. And I think, if you look around the country, social
museums are the ones that are on the up at the moment.What was it that attracted you to this project?
Are you a stamp enthusiast? A train buff?
My dad [news presenter Peter Snow] is a bit of a stamp
enthusiast, also a massive train enthusiast, so it’s in the family.
But I think what attracted me to it was the scale and the ambition
of it. I’m big on infrastructure. I’m fascinated by systems and
by the incredible ingenuity that human beings come up with to
defeat the traditional enemies of humanity which is: ignorance,
our slowness, our relative unimportance in the world. We’ve
learnt how to overcome so many of those obstacles using things
like Rail Mail, indeed the original postal service.
The Royal Mail facilitated the most important social network
in the history of the world. What Tim Berners-Lee did for
the internet, the Royal Mail was doing during the Industrial
Revolution. During what we call The Enlightenment, when
human beings started to realise that we could throw off all
those old prejudices and ideas with science and reason, people
corresponded with each other. They formed a social network.
We’re still living with the consequences of what the Royal Mail
facilitated all those years ago. That’s what’s inspiring about it.dumped its load onto a conveyor belt, was wonderfully evocative. Very
‘Marie Celeste’, in fact, with all the original signage and several ‘mini Yorks’
(driverless trucks used to shunt mail between sorting offices) still sitting on
the deactivated tracks.
When the attraction opens, visitors will travel though a one-kilometre
stretch of one these very tunnels in a luxury version of the same mail trucks.
There, they will enjoy an audio visual symphony as projected images and
sound effects take them on a journey through time to the London of the
postal past. After the ride, they will continue that journey in an interactive
exhibition space based in the original car depot where five zones will take
them from Henry VIII’s ‘royal mail’ to the Blitz, and beyond. In just under a
year a place few people have ever seen before will become one of the capital’s
must-see destinations, opening up the story of London’s postal history to a
new generation of philatelic newbies and enthusiasts.
Chris King, past President of Royal Philatelic Society London and
member of the Stamp & Coin Mart Advisory Board, believes the new
museum is hugely important for many different reasons. ‘First because
the British Postal Museum & Archive, now the Postal Musuem, has one
of the best collections of materials relating to our postal post that can be
put together,’ he says. ‘In recent years, all of this material has been really
hard to see because it’s been in a basement covered over in the dust of
time. So this is a great opportunity to get everything out in the open so
that a new public can enjoy it. What we’ve got here is a city-centre, new
museum which will be available to researchers and collectors in a far
easier way than it has been for several decades.’p16-17 Stamp update.indd 17 01/03/2016 11: