The Red Mailbox next to our village’s primary school is my primary drop-off point for writing letters. Over the decades, its bright deep red brilliance has been gradually replaced by a patina of sunburned broken red. And yet, The Red Mailbox persists. It still exists. It existed over thirty years ago, when I went to that very school next to it.
Other Red Mailboxes aren’t that lucky: in 2019, BPost—the Belgian posting company that was privatised in 2000—removed over one fourth of the Red Mailboxes all over Belgium in an attempt to “save the company”. The biggest reason might not surprise you: most of these boxes didn’t receive much letters:
Volgens BPost is het aantal brieven dat mensen in de rode brievenbussen deponeren, met 60 procent gedaald sinds 2004. Uit een kwart van de bussen haalt de postbode nog hoogstens zes brieven per dag op, luidt het. [According to BPost, the amount of letters that people deposit in the red mailboxes has diminished by 60 percent since 2004]
That year also happened to be the year of BPost’s stock market crash. Still, I think ultimately their decision was the right one: of all the letters I send out, I only receive about a fourth replies in that same analogue form. Especially in 2026, people don’t use The Red Mailbox anymore, turning the battered broken red metal box attached to a brick wall into a weird artefact of the past. I wonder how long it’ll take before the same emotion is triggered as wandering around in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild’s broken world, where artefact bits and pieces poking out of a ruin reminiscent of a once thriving community now only cause weariness.
Before the Mailbox Removal Program, BPost also permanently closed multiple post offices. Our village’s old post office building now is a Turkish food joint. Yet another thing of the past, just like physical banks, toy stores, and if we’re not careful, bakeries and butcher shops. Yet we are nimble: a bike ride in two directions, both about four kilometres, will take you to another office. Do verify opening hours before leaving.
Even Google Street View archives dating back to 2009 do not have a photo of the old post office building in its original state. The archives do contain traces of deceased Red Mailboxes, such as the one below weirdly enough mounted against the front facade of someone’s home? I would like to believe that the owners of the house kept a notebook besides one of the windows to track all those weird people stopping by to drop their weird letters.
The dismounting job revealed an ugly square stain behind it. Passengers will no doubt wonder what used to be on that wall, thinking the owners of that house must have done something weird. They didn’t: the government did.
I wonder what personal history The Red Mailbox can tell us. How many love letters did it ingest all these years? Or birth announcement cards? Marriages? The bearer of happy news. Let us intentionally leave out the boring and perhaps more depressing tax related correspondence. We made good use of that very same mailbox when we got married, and when we had our daughter and son—I can distinctly remember it barely containing the envelopes when I dumped all those birth cards in there at once. The expected Thunk! sound of the envelope hitting the bottom was replaced by the shuffling of papers and me trying to jam them all in. I still make good use of that trusty old mailbox whenever I feel like using a pen to send a message to a pen pal, which admittedly happens less and less. Perhaps I too am a part of the problem.
The Red Mailbox was not always there. In fact, it’s one of the more modern alternatives—relatively speaking—compared to the late 19th century cast iron standalone models that are now officially classified as being part of our Flemish/national heritage. This particular model in the link still stands proudly in Antwerp, yet these are the exception to the rule: I haven’t encountered a cast iron painted one in our vicinity. The little door to retrieve the letters is a lovely touch.
According to heritage info of the city Spa, these models were cast by the J.G.Requilled foundries of Liège between 1860 and 1938. The most striking difference between these original models and the ones on the photos above is perhaps the fact that its purpose is no longer explicitly mentioned: the French inscription “LETTRES/IMPRIMES” is gone. By now everyone knows that a Red Mailbox is a letterbox from BPost, not a personal one. I hope.
If you ever received a letter from me: think of The Red Mailbox where its humble journey all the way to your letterbox started.
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