Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you’ll excuse a journey into our personal taste here.
But, perhaps this is a timely invitation to appreciate the beauty you admire in stamps.
Stamp designers work on a tiny canvas: the Penny black was less than an inch in each direction (19mm by 22mm).
And they have a number of functional imperatives to meet: a price, a royal portrait, and the complex graphics that have been the first line of defence in anti-fraud design.
Yet, still they produce little works of art that we can admire today.
Here is a choice - you will have your own - of the five most beautiful GB stamps.
1 - GB 1847 - 54 Embossed
The lovely example here is the pale green 1 shilling stamp, but you could choose any of the short-lived GB embossed experiment among a list of aesthetically pleasing stamp designs.
In many ways, the embossed stamps are very typical of Victorian stamp design. A frame of complex, interleaving lines (these designs were intended to be hard to reproduce in forgeries) encloses the most famous portrait of Queen Victoria, derived from William Wyon’s Young Head medallion design.
These new high-value stamps had important postal functions, opening up the world (and Britain’s growing Empire) to letters and packages.
And their means of production was potentially very high quality. They were hand-stamped one-at-a-time. Some on high-quality, silk-thread paper. But it was a double-edge sword, requiring precision work in a mind-numbingly tedious process.
Good quality prints, though, produced, for a short while (the experiment was abandoned in 1854) some of GB’s best and most beautiful stamps.
2 - 1902 £1 Edward
Many Victorian designs were carried over into Edward's range, but this striking new shape and look was new. Click the image to discover this stamp.
The Long One Pound is an essay in proportion and detail.
Looking at those intricate frames, you forget that this is just a single colour (the uninspiringly named “dull blue green”) on white..
A £1 stamp was a lot of money in 1902 when these stamps were produced in the first and only definitive issue of Edward VII’s reign. Most ordinary workers would need to work for more than a day, but less than a week, to afford one of these, worth over £150 according to inflation calculators.
Emil Fuchs is the man behind the profile of the king used here. And De La Rue, using their “key hole” printing method, made several innovations in design to clean up the sometimes cluttered frontage of Victorian high-value stamps. The corner letters are gone, and the text is centred below the kings portrait in a lovely sans serif font.
It is incredibly elegant and functionally faultless - it’s a £1 postage stamp, and you immediately know that.
The Edwardian public didn’t particularly like the wide horizontal profile of the stamp - three standard stamps wide - we’re told. History has been kinder to it and stamp aficionados rate the design very highly.
3 - 1929 £1 Postal Union Congress
Check out details like the dragon's claw clasping the stamp's frame to appreciate what a wonderful, tiny work this is. Click the image to discover this stamp.
No doubt, the Post Office wanted to do their best for this issue, that celebrated the arrival in London of the great and good of the world’s mails for their four-yearly meeting.
They issued a full set of definitives using three designs. This £1 stamp was a late addition to the planned issue, possibly to flatter the arriving delegates (who were gifted the stamps) or to defray costs.
Whatever its purpose, the George and Dragon design by Harold Nelson has proved to be an enduring classic. Bradbury, Wilkinson & Co line engraved the design for printing.
Nelson was a substantial presence in early 20th-century Britain’s visual culture. Though he specialised in book plates, he also produced work for the popular illustrated designs of the period.
This design reflects his love of William Morris’ idyllic imagining of medieval craft workers. And, stamp lovers will see echoes of the better-known and equally beloved Seahorses with its strong national and imperial symbolism.
Although the wonderful detail of the design and its careful shading attracts the eye, the stamp remains functionally impeccable with its lovely proportions and elegant but clear £1 price panel in the bottom right corner.
4 - Edward VIII accession definitives
Edward VIII's accession issue had to be rushed out, but the process was difficult and the designs ground-breaking. Click the image to discover the stamp.
The graded colours fading from right to left, the placing of the crown, price and crown and a lovely sans-serif capitalised POSTAGE.
These stamps might look rather run-of-the-mill today, but they represented a big bang of modernisation when they were designed.
The new designs used photogravure printing - then cutting edge - to reproduce the photographic portrait of Edward, and were the first stamps designed to make the most of the process’s strengths.
A swan would be the perfect metaphor for this stamp. That cool elegant design was the result of furious behind-the-scenes paddling during an extremely fraught process that was rather typical of how the new king plonked himself on the throne.
Edward famously abdicated around a year into his reign, but these stamps were issued, and because of the king’s blink-and-you-missed-it rule were issued into the George VI period too. So, they’re not rare, in part because so many people held onto them after the abdication believing they might be.
They are still striking, elegant and capture an important moment in the history of British stamp design.
5 - Queen Elizabeth II Cathedrals 1969
There's an error on this stamp, can you spot it, that makes it one of the few of this attractive 60s commemorative to have a high price. Click the image to explore this stamp.
Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign saw stamp design broaden in scope, colour and style.
There is so much more to choose from and the choices will be far more a result of personal taste.
And, I like these.
Peter Gauld made a number of striking designs for the Royal Mail after World War II, including some striking graphical designs celebrating new tech.
These designs are historical though, celebrating what are perhaps the greatest achievements in British architecture and building.
The designs really do them justice too, packing in loads of detail and extracting a single feature from each building to illustrate the architectural drawings of the entire building.
I really recommend taking a look at these stamps against a set of photographs of the buildings they celebrate. I think they do a wonderful job of capturing the buildings without attempting to be photorealistic.
As modern commemoratives, these stamps aren't yet particularly rare or valuable, but some sets, condition states, errors and special rarities are. In whatever form you find them, no GB stamp collection should be without them.
What do you think?
Stamps are little bits of paper that stir big feelings.
And everyone has their own taste in art and design.
What are your favourite British stamp designs?
Take a look at our collection of beautiful, rare and historic GB stamps here.
