Royal Mail
Royal Mail Group Limited, trading as Royal Mail, is a British postal service and courier company. It is owned by International Distribution Services. It operates the brands Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide. Formed in 2001, the company used the name Consignia for a brief period but changed it soon afterwards. Prior to this date, Royal Mail and Parcelforce were part of the Post Office, a UK state-owned enterprise the history of which is summarised below. Long before it came to be a company name, the 'Royal Mail' brand had been used by the General Post Office to identify its distribution network.
The company provides mail collection and delivery services throughout the UK. Letters and parcels are deposited in post or parcel boxes, or are collected in bulk from businesses and transported to Royal Mail sorting offices. Royal Mail owns and maintains the UK's distinctive and iconic red pillar boxes, first introduced in 1852, and other post boxes, many of which bear the royal cypher of the reigning monarch at the date of manufacture. Deliveries are made at least once every day except Sundays and bank holidays at uniform charges for all UK destinations. Royal Mail generally aims to make first class deliveries the next business day throughout the nation.
For most of its history, the Royal Mail was a public service, operating as a government department or public corporation. Following the Postal Services Act 2011, Royal Mail Group Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of a new holding company, Royal Mail plc; a majority of the shares in Royal Mail plc were floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2013. Nine years later Royal Mail plc was renamed International Distribution Services. In April 2025, IDS was acquired by EP Group, a Czech-based company owned by Daniel Křetínský, for a value of £3.6 billion after agreeing legally binding undertakings with the UK government. The government has retained a so-called golden share. The deal marked the first time the Royal Mail was under foreign ownership.
History
The Royal Mail can trace its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a "Master of the Posts", a position that was renamed "Postmaster General" in 1710.Upon his accession to the throne of England at the Union of the Crowns in 1603, James VI of Scotland moved his court to London. One of his first acts from London was to establish the royal postal service between London and Edinburgh, in an attempt to retain control over the Scottish Privy Council.
Government office
The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I on 31 July 1635, with postage being paid by the recipient. The monopoly was farmed out to Thomas Witherings.In the 1640s, Parliament removed the monopoly from Witherings and during the Civil War and First Commonwealth the parliamentary postal service was run at great profit for himself by Edmund Prideaux. To keep his monopoly in those troubled times Prideaux improved efficiency and used both legal impediments and illegal methods.
In 1653, Parliament set aside all previous grants for postal services, and contracts were let for the inland and foreign mails to John Manley. Manley was given a monopoly on the postal service, which was effectively enforced by Protector Oliver Cromwell's government, and thanks to the improvements necessitated by the war, Manley ran a much-improved Post Office service. In July 1655, the Post Office was put under the direct government control of John Thurloe, a Secretary of State, best known to history as Cromwell's spymaster general. Previous English governments had tried to prevent conspirators from communicating; Thurloe preferred to deliver their post having surreptitiously read it. As the Protectorate claimed to govern all of Great Britain and Ireland under one unified government, on 9 June 1657 the Second Protectorate Parliament passed the "Act for settling the Postage in England, Scotland and Ireland", which created one monopoly Post Office for the whole territory of the Commonwealth. The first Postmaster General was appointed in 1661, and a seal was first fixed to the mail.
At the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, all the ordinances and acts passed by parliaments during the Civil War and the Interregnum passed into oblivion, so the General Post Office was officially established by Charles II under the .
Between 1719 and 1763, Ralph Allen, postmaster at Bath, signed a series of contracts with the post office to develop and expand Britain's postal network. He organised mail coaches which were provided by both Wilson & Company of London and Williams & Company of Bath. The early Royal Mail Coaches were similar to ordinary family coaches, but with Post Office livery.
The first mail coach ran in 1784, operating between Bristol and London. Delivery staff received uniforms for the first time in 1793, and the Post Office Investigation Branch was established. The first mail train ran in 1830, on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The Post Office's money order system was introduced in 1838.
Uniform penny postage
In December 1839, the first substantial reform started when postage rates were revised by the short-lived Uniform Fourpenny Post.Rowland Hill, an English teacher, inventor and social reformer, became disillusioned with the postal service, and wrote a paper proposing reforms that resulted in an approach that would go on to change not only the Royal Mail, but also be copied by postal services around the world. His proposal was refused at the first attempt, but he overcame the political obstacles, and was appointed to implement and develop his ideas. He realised that many small purchases would fund the organisation and implemented this by changing it from a receiver-pays to a sender-pays system. This was used as the model for other postal services around the world, but also spilled over to the modern-day crowd-funding approach.
Greater changes took place when the Uniform Penny Post was introduced on 10 January 1840, whereby a single rate for delivery anywhere in Great Britain and Ireland was pre-paid by the sender. A few months later, to certify that postage had been paid on a letter, the sender could affix the first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, which was available for use from 6 May the same year. Other innovations were the introduction of pre-paid William Mulready designed postal stationery letter sheets and envelopes.
As Britain was the first country to issue prepaid postage stamps, British stamps are the only stamps that do not bear the name of the country of issue on them.
By the late 19th century, there were between six and twelve mail deliveries per day in London, permitting correspondents to exchange multiple letters within a single day.
The first trial of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company was made in 1863, sending mail by underground rail between postal depots. The Post Office began its telegraph service in 1870.
Pillar boxes
The first Post Office pillar box was erected in 1852 in Jersey. Pillar boxes were introduced in mainland Britain the following year. British pillar boxes traditionally carry the Latin initials of the reigning monarch at the time of their installation, for example: VR for Victoria Regina or GR for Georgius Rex. Such branding was not used in Scotland for most of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, due to a dispute over the monarch's title: some Scottish nationalists argue that Queen Elizabeth II should have simply been Queen Elizabeth, as there had been no previous Queen Elizabeth of Scotland or of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The dispute involved vandalism and attacks on pillar and post boxes introduced in Scotland which displayed EIIR. To avoid the issue, pillar boxes in Scotland were either marked 'Post Office' or used the Scots Crown.A national telephone service was opened by the Post Office in 1912. In 1919, the first international airmail service was developed by Royal Engineers and Royal Air Force. The London Post Office Railway was opened in 1927.
In 1941, an airgraph service was introduced between UK and Egypt. The service was later extended to Canada, East Africa, Burma, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon , and Italy.
Postcodes were extended across Great Britain and Northern Ireland between 1959 and 1974. The two-class postal system was introduced in 1968, using first-class and second-class services. The Post Office opened the National Giro Bank that year.
In April 2025, Royal Mail announced that they were trialing a new solar-powered "postbox of the future" with a built-in barcode reader and a hatch to accept parcels up to the size of a shoebox.
Statutory corporation
Under the Post Office Act 1969 the General Post Office was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation, known simply as the Post Office. The office of Postmaster General was abolished and replaced with the positions of chairman and chief executive in the new company. In 1971, postal services in Great Britain were suspended for two months between January and March as the result of a national postal strike over a pay claim.British Telecom was separated from the Post Office in 1980, and emerged as an independent business in 1981. In 1986 the Post Office was subdivided into four businesses: Royal Mail Letters, Royal Mail Parcels, Post Office Counters and the National Girobank. Girobank was sold to Alliance & Leicester in 1990, but the remaining business continued under public ownership as privatisation of this was deemed to be too unpopular. That same year, Royal Mail Parcels was rebranded as Parcelforce as part of an attempt to compete with international courier firms, which were fast expanding into the European market.
Postal workers held their first national strike for 17 years in 1988, after walking out over bonuses being paid to recruit new workers in London and the South East. Royal Mail established Romec in 1989 to deliver facilities maintenance services to its business. Romec was 51% owned by Royal Mail, and 49% by Haden Building Management Ltd, which became Balfour Beatty WorkPlace and is now Cofely UK, part of GDF Suez in a joint venture.
In the 1990s the President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine, began to look again at privatisation, and eventually a Green Paper on Postal Reform was published in May 1994, outlining various possible options. The ideas, however, proved controversial, and were dropped from the 1994 Queen's Speech after a number of Conservative MPs warned Heseltine that they would not vote for the legislation.
In 1998, Royal Mail launched RelayOne as an email to postal service system. In 1999, Royal Mail launched a short-lived e-commerce venture, ViaCode Limited, aimed at providing encrypted online communications services. However, it failed to make a profit and closed in 2002.
In 1999 Royal Mail acquired German Parcel, incorporating it into a newly formed holding company, General Logistics Systems B.V., which over the next few years was used to establish an international network of parcel couriers. In 2002 the GLS brand was launched, which later went on to function as Royal Mail's European parcels business.