New Issue: River Thames Sailing Barge Set!

Today, 20 November 2025, we release a new multiple definitive stamp set to celebrate the contribution Thames sailing barges made to the development of trade in London and the south-east of England along the Thames Estuary. 

The AI assisted design, the first use of the tool by CILP, reflects early British Edwardian stamp designs and feature a stylized Thames barge. Printed as a strip on the sheet, the stamps cover the four classes of service available.

River Thames Sailing Barge Set (CP075/78)

Thames sailing barges were a commercial boat once common on the River Thames. The flat-bottomed barges had a shallow draught that was ideal for the Thames Estuary, and its surrounding shallow waters and tributaries. Their heyday was at the beginning of the 20th century when over 2000 barges were registered. For two hundred years barge design remained virtually unchanged until the 1860s, when a series of barge races were started and barge designs improved to compete.

A First Day Cover (FDC27) and a FDI Postcard (FDP19) has also been issued. Please note the River Thames Sailing Barge stamps will only be available as two se-tenant pairs of stamps (Standard/Express and Priority/Official) and not as a strip.

All our available stamps and covers can be obtained from Alpha Thematics on Ebid UK. 

Postmaster

Additions to 2025 Schedule

Following a review of possible future stamp designs for 2026 and beyond, and the adoption of some AI aided design features which makes detailed designs quicker to produce, it has been decided to add at least two further stamp issues to this year's releases. Once confirmed with our printer, these additional issues will be formally announced. Watch this space!

Postmaster

Flags, Statistics and AI Theft!

 Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) development by big corporations the death-knell for copyright law and intellectual rights? If international legislators do not grasp this nettle soon, I fear we may have already lost the battle to keep ownership of anything we create.

On our website we have a useful and interesting application called ‘Flagcounter’ that shows the location of our visitors from the top twenty countries, by displaying their national flags in the right lower margin of our home page. But over the last few years, a worrying trend has developed.

The UK and USA have naturally been the top nations from which our visitors originated, with around 6% of our total visitors coming from these two English-speaking countries. In contrast, in less than two years, Singapore has sped up the visitor list and now accounts for 90% of our visitors! I doubt Singapore has that many cinderella local post devotees.

 After a little delving it appears the Singapore statistics represent internet robots, spiders, or crawlers, designed to “borrow” images for AI resources. In other words, stealing without credit to the image owner or creator.

Image Source: Pixabay

It seems Google Analytics (GA) filters out these visitors from Singapore, as they do not appear in website GA results. Of course, AI crawlers are not only restricted to Singapore, they are being used by all the major (and minor) AI developers targeting the world wide web.

The worst thing is they cannot be stopped from visiting my website even when they are specifically blocked in the site .htaccess file. Other website owners have reported similar futile attempts to protect their sites from these AI thieves. If I had not been using the application ‘Flagcounter’ I would not have noticed this digital burglary at all!

In order to counter this free unattributed use of CILP stamp images by AI bots, CILP is proposing to deface future stamp images with diagonal red lines, as is the custom of stamp issuing authorities worldwide. 

Am I bolting the door after the horse has bolted? Maybe, but a little victory makes me feel better!

 

Postmaster