page_title: London Penny Post
section_title: Premier postal system
hierarchical_section_title: London Penny Post / Premier postal system
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque erected by the Corporation of London at Lime Street, London, EC3M
context_page_description: The London Penny Post was a premier postal system whose function was to deliver mail within London and its immediate suburbs for the modest sum of one penny. The Penny Post was established in 1680 by William Dockwra and his business partner, Robert Murray. Dockwra was a merchant and a member of the Armourer and Brasiers Livery Company and was appointed a Customs Under-Searcher for the Port of London in 1663. Murray would later become clerk in the excise office of the Penny Post. The London Penny Post mail service was launched with weeks of publicity preceding it on 27 March 1680. The new London Penny Post provided the city of London with a much needed intra-city mail delivery system. The new Penny Post was influential in establishing a model system and pattern for the various Provincial English Penny Posts in the years that followed. It was the first postal system to use hand-stamps to postmark the mail to indicate the place and time of the mailing and that its postage had been prepaid. The success of the Penny Post would also threaten the interests of the Duke of York who profited directly from the existing general post office.
context_section_description: Several Penny Post offices were established at various points within London where letters that were collected from drop-boxes about the city were sorted and sent out for delivery. Dockwra, Murrey and their partners divided London between Westminster and Blackwell and between Hackney and Lambeth into seven districts with a sorting office for each. They established a Head Office that was set up in the home of Dockwra himself who was living in a mansion on Lime Street that was formerly owned by Sir Robert Abdy. Dockwra established hourly collections, with a maximum of ten deliveries daily for London and a minimum of six deliveries for the various London suburbs, such as Hackney and Islington. However Robert Murray was arrested in May 1680, along with another associate of the Penny Post, George Cowdron, for distributing by means of the Penny Post what was considered to be seditious material criticising the Duke of York (afterwards James II). This left Dockwra to manage the Penny Post and as such credit is roundly given to him for its designs and further improvements as the Penny Post at that point having only been in operation for a couple of months was still in its developmental stages. Within two years the Penny Post had grown to such proportions that approximately four to five hundred receiving-houses and wall-boxes had been established at various locations about the city of London, however some of the accounts vary. E.g. in Robert Seymour's Survey of London and Westminster, published in 1735, he puts the number of receiving houses at over 600. Dockwra's Penny Post delivered letters and packets weighing up to one pound and delivery was guaranteed within four hours, each letter being marked with a heart shaped time stamp indicating the time an item was dropped off for delivery. Because the new postal service was affordable to the general public with its inexpensive flat rate of one penny it became an almost instant success and became the predecessor of the postal systems that later emerged and are still in use today in Great Britain and elsewhere today. To announce the new Penny Post's inter-city mail services public notices were published in several local newspapers (figure 1) and notices and posters were also printed and circulated.
caption: Dockwra plaque in Lime Street, London
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