The Post Office Tower was built in 1961. It was the biggest thing in London since… well, forever, because it became the tallest building in London. At that time. Of course we’ve had all manner of gherkins and walkie-talkies and shards and other architectural abominations since then which dwarf our little tower. But I loved it when it was built and I love it now. Everyone went to see it. Obviously in black&white, but they queued round the block in their sports jackets and ties and frocks and slacks, to visit this most fab of buildings. I think I liked it because it looked like Thunderbird 1, but I was 6, so gimme a break.

My dad was a clever man. And a bit of a closet philatelist. That’s not a perversion. Well, not in the normal sense. But his ‘thing’ was that in reading the stampy magazines he learned that what made stamps ‘collectible’ were the differences. Not the fabulous photos on the ‘commemorative’ stamps which came out four or five times a year, but the tiny differences on the ‘definitives’, the boring, everyday stamps with just a Queen’s head and ‘2d’ written in the corner. These stamps were run seemingly unchanged for decades. Seemingly. Because they did change. Invisibly. They changed the ‘gum’ (ya licked stamps in those days), and they changed the phosphor bands. Which were almost invisible bands used by the automated sorting systems. And that was my dad’s ‘niche’.

He worked out that all the stamps from vending machines, little ‘books’ had different phosphor bands than those bought on sheets. So he would go to the post office and buy 100 stamp books. They cost about £1 each, had lots of different stamps in, most of them useless. Except the smallest value one. A ‘halfpenny’ stamp. Which only came with some odd variety of some tiny deviation in those books. And he’d sell them, through ads in the stamp mags, for a fiver. And he couldn’t buy them quick enough for all those grubby little men in Peterborough with their tweezers and magnifying glasses, desperate to add such a thing to their collection. (Peteboro’ may have had grubby little women too, but they didn’t do such things in the 60s).

The Post Office Tower had a vending machine. You bought two lovely, pretty, ‘commemoratives’ in a Post Office Tower envelope for a pound in the machine in the foyer. And the ones bought there were overprinted with extra words which weren’t on all the ones in the nation’s post offices. Oh my. Extra words!!!! Which made them unique. Which caused virtual erections in Peterborough and beyond.

So every Thursday (my dad’s day off) when I wasn’t at school, we’d drive to the Tower, (you could park anywhere in 1962) with a sack of money. Because the machine didn’t take notes and the pound coin didn’t get invented until 1981. And we would, quite literally, empty the vending machine of its entire content. It was the best fun ever, endlessly pumping two shilling pieces into a machine and enhanced further my love of the building.

And having sat empty for decades, it’s going to become a hotel. There’s talk that the once famous ‘revolving restaurant’ up high will return. I hope that the hotel and restaurant don’t take credit cards. Nor paper money. Just coins. That would be perfect.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx