About

Not sure how I ended up running a postbox finder, or why Royal Mail kept refusing to release co-ordinates because it would harm their commercial interests and yet it’s been 12 years and they still don’t have one, but as Alex says: “can you get a purer version of it, a more raw distilling of the essence of civic technology than this postbox finder”.

History

2008, original FOI request, which gave a textual description of each postbox’s location: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/location_of_every_post_box_that. I created a crowd-sourcing tool to have users precisely locate the boxes based off this list.
2008, another FOI to also get last collection times, added to my site: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/last_collection_times
2009, an updated list of collection times/boxes: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/postbox_collection_times
2009, article in the Guardian about the stupidity of this data being private: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/sep/16/freedom-of-information-postboxes
2010, another FOI request; went all the way to the Information Commissioner, but supplied in the end, including co-ordinates: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/postbox_data_in_central_collecti.
2012, updated FOI request: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/postbox_data_in_central_collecti_2
2013, another update, the last including co-ordinates: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/partially_redacted_postbox_locat

Once I had enough data, I could create a nearest postbox tool. I also took a feed from OpenStreetMap of any postboxes there, using that to update any changes. This means my site is a mix of Royal Mail locations, crowd-sourced locations, and OpenStreetMap locations, with the OSM quota slowly creeping up over time (yay).

So if a box is in the wrong place, or the last collection times are wrong, fix the data on OpenStreetMap and the site will pull in the update (and everyone else will benefit). I don't automatically remove postboxes, though, so do let me know if a postbox has gone.