While riding home from Russia last week, I amused myself in Belgium by photographing as many types of letter box as I could find. The postal service in Belgium only delivers as far as the boundary of your property, not the front door as in the UK, so if you have a front garden, you'll need a letter box next to your front gate. There are several styles, as I discovered.
First of all, brutalist mid 20th-century concrete:
Not to be confused with a slightly more elegant but nevertheless square utilitarian design:
Then there are Atomium-inspired stainless steel examples of varying shininess:
or simple Flemish brickwork
One of the most popular is a Victorian/Edwardian/pre-war cast-iron job, which can personalised by painting it a distinctive colour (especially if that colour is green)
or leaving it
au naturel
Very often such a letter box appears to be older than the house.
This one loses some of its charm through the crude attachment of a pipe for delivering newspapers.
If you don't have a front garden, a simple wall-mounted box will suffice
But if you have a simple letter box, don't over compensate.
"
I may only have a tiny letter box,
BUT LOOK AT THE SIZE OF MY WINDMILL!"
Then there are the whimsical (verging on the downright quirky)
But my favourite was probably this bird (or is it a fish?), which serves a house on the other side of the canal. Whoever lives there has to row across the canal to collect the mail.
