On October 20, Royal Mail’s Mr Men & Little Miss issue will celebrate one of Britain’s most popular series of children’s characters, created by Roger Hargreaves.
With their bold, colourful designs and simple personality traits, they have have been enchanting children for more than 40 years, branching out from a successful series of books into television cartoons.
It all started when Hargreaves’ young son Adam innocently asked him: ‘What does a tickle look like?’ His father visualised a small orange man with absurdly long arms, drafted an illustrated story about him, and never looked back.
A set of six stamps to be issued on September 15 will commemorate the work of the British author Agatha Christie, who is claimed to be the best-selling novelist of all time.
Christie is most renowned for her 66 murder and detective mysteries, of which 33 featured the fastidious Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, and 12 featured the intuitive English spinster, Miss Marple.
The 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London will be commemorated by an issue of six stamps on September 2.
The fire broke out in bakery of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday September 2, 1666.
For three days it spread through the city, helped by the close-packed wooden houses, thatched roofs, stored materials such as pitch and tar, and a strong westerly wind.
The Landscape Gardens set, to be issued by Royal Mail on August 16, marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (c1716-1783), who is renowned as ‘England’s greatest gardener’, or more properly Britain’s greatest landscape architect.
In designing more than 170 parks and gardens (and in some cases houses), Brown changed the face of 18th-century England, establishing a new breed of country estate which was ‘naturalistic’, carefully landscaped without being formally patterned.
He not only planted shrubs and trees but also moved hills, and dammed rivers to fabricate lakes in strategic places.
The 150th anniversary of the birth of Beatrix Potter will be commemorated on July 28 with a total of 10 stamps illustrating many of the timeless characters she created.
A set of six portray the leading characters in six of her most popular books, while a four-stamp miniature sheet features scenes from The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Both a storyteller and an artist, Potter (1866-1943) made her name with a series of children’s tales featuring anthropomorphic animals, starting with The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published in 1902.
Showing scenes from the Bayeaux Tapestry, the stamps marking the 900th anniversary of the battle that secured the Norman Conquest were truly astonishing in their day.
The 4d values provided Great Britain’s first ever se-tenant strip of six, but arguably the stars of the show were the two higher values, both of which had the new cameo Queen’s head embossed in gold.
The 1s 3d top value was also of extra-wide format, allowing one scene of combat to be presented on a single stamp in all its primitive energy.
Royal Mail will issue a set of 10 stamps on July 7 to celebrate one of the most influential British rock bands of all time, Pink Floyd.
Six self-adhesive stamps reproduce iconic record sleeve designs, in the same freeform style as the 2010 Classic Album Covers set (which included a different Pink Floyd album).
A Pink Floyd Live miniature sheet of four further designs is based on photographs from stage performances, taken over four different decades.
The second of a series of three poppy designs in the Lest We Forget series, from a miniature sheet commemorating the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, is dominated by the intense red of the flower, almost like a spreading pool of blood.
A closer look at the black stamen reveals a group of soldiers going over the top, advancing through what was a once a grove of trees, now reduced to broken stumps.
This is a very potent image indeed, as we realise that, like half a million men in the bloody battle, they are leaving us, never to return.
The four designs issued on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London do not sit well as a set, but the 3d violet was the most dynamic and original.
The aptly named designer adopted a poster art approach, showing an athlete’s head pushing ahead out of a globe, apparently straining for the finish line.
The parallel lines trailing behind him also suggest speed, and variations in the background shade suggest the transition from day to night in what was the first global sports festival since the end of World War II.
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