What Now for the Evington Knit and Natter Group?
The Knit and Natter group who meet at Eden Café on Main Street Evington Village every Tuesday, have been producing quirky post box toppers to brighten up the shopping area for some years now. However, the design of our familiar red post-boxes, which have remained largely unchanged since Victorian times, is about to be altered. The cylindrical bodies, domed heads and narrow letter slots are about to be replaced with peaked roofs with solar panels and a parcel drawer just below the letter slot.
This means that yarn-bombers, as this group of street artists are known, have had to come up with new plans for their post-box toppers. Syston has a famous knitting ‘Banksy’, an anonymous knitter in Leicestershire, who has made over one hundred toppers. And has raised thousands of pounds for charity and has even featured in Coronation Street at Christmas for the past four years.
In Syston after failed attempts to petition against the change, some people decided to raise funds to buy a decommissioned cast-iron post-box of their own. It was due to be unveiled at the end of February. It will not be in service as a post-box, but it will allow the topper-craft to continue.
Other groups have simply adapted their designs to fit the new electronic boxes, obviously ensuring the solar panel is not obstructed. One group in Lancashire has come up with a new pattern which they have shared on Facebook.
Even though there is some suggestion that street crochet began in the USA, according to the Royal Mail, crochet post box toppers started appearing in the UK about 2012. It was around Christmas time of that year when Christmas themed toppers began, then, the crochet cult started moving into other themes appropriate to time of the year such as Easter, with toppers carrying Spring themes.
Almost a decade later, during the Covid pandemic, when travel and social mixing was severely restricted, some folk learned to crochet, and the trend expanded with post-box toppers springing up far and wide. Some sources report 2022 as one of the most popular years for this quirky craze and it hasn’t apparently slowed down since.
Surprisingly Royal Mail approves of knitted post-box toppers and are supportive of what it brings to the communities.
They do ask, of course, that nothing is done to permanently alter the post-box, that nothing obstructs the letter slot for the mail and that nothing restricts the postman from collecting the mail. So, as long as the designs are fun and charming, and not making some pointed political or social statements, they’re totally supportive of it.
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