The stamp that started it all - the Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp. With kind permission of the BPMA © Royal Mail Group plc.

David Prudames parcelled himself up and had himself thrown on the night train to the big smoke to explore the origins of the postal system...

When people think of Victorian innovation they might come up with Brunel spanning rivers with awe-inspiring structures or Darwin, literally, re-writing human history. They might not, however, immediately contemplate postage.

But if you ask Douglas Muir – the man behind the British Postal Museum And Archive’s (BPMA) new exhibition - they’d be wrongly ignoring the most ground-breaking innovation of all: "There are a vast number of innovations that took place in the Victorian era," he says, "perhaps the most important and radical was the introduction of the first postage stamp."

Victorian Innovation is the latest display from the BPMA and is on show at their current HQ within Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant depot in London until April 2006. It tells the story of Rowland Hill’s establishment of a penny post in 1840 and the industrial and social progression it spawned.

The first British postage stamp printed letter press by De La Rue, complete with perforations, 1855. With kind permission of the BPMA © Royal Mail Group plc.

Tony Conder, BPMA Chief Executive, told the 24 Hour Museum that the display might be small but the influence of the material contained therein is somewhat larger.

"The innovation of the postage stamp brought about the first communications revolution," he said. "Before then [1840] stamps had cost a lot of money and what the Penny Black did was to introduce a universal communications system that anybody could afford. Suddenly the poorest working man in, say, London could send a letter back to Glasgow if that’s where he came from."

Of course, the Penny Black – the world’s first adhesive postage stamp – is well represented in this exhibition. There’s ‘Plate 1’ of the registration sheet of Penny Blacks from April 27 1840 (the first ever printed sheet of Penny Blacks) and the original master die used to print them.

But in context the power of these objects is in telling the story of what they made possible. The instant popularity of sending letters paved the way for envelopes to be invented, a means of perforating sheets of stamps and post boxes to be devised.

Travelling post offices were established on trains with sorting being carried out en route. In a time before radio, television, the Internet, cars and airplanes, post made the world a smaller place. To prove it there’s a letter on show addressed to a Mr Joseph Ball of Boston, which was transported across the Atlantic on board Brunel’s Great Western.

Rowland Hill, the founder of the Penny Post, by Mary Martha Pearson. With kind permission of the BPMA © Royal Mail Group plc.

Yet the affordable postal system did more than allow fast and efficient communication. It was also, explained Douglas Muir, "an instrument of social reform."

Hill wanted it to be affordable to all because he saw it as a way of improving the literacy standards of the nation, what he perhaps didn’t envisage was the next step: fuelling economic growth.

In 1861 there were only 638 savings banks in the UK – the majority of the population didn’t have enough to contemplate saving - but within a year 2,532 post offices had established branches of the Post Office Savings Bank on their premises.

All you needed to open an account was a shilling, but for those for whom even that was too much ‘stamp slip deposits’ were created in 1880 which meant 12 penny stamps could be bought gradually and stuck on a form to make up the shilling deposit.

He's a bit different from his modern counterpart, but the Victorian postie was still a vital cog in the global communications machine. With kind permission of the BPMA © Royal Mail Group plc.

"Suddenly instead of just putting a penny in a sock under the bed there was a system that allowed you to save money and the country began to become savers and investors," explained Tony Conder.

On first view stamps don't seem to be up there with the greatest inventions of the Victorian age, but a quick look at this exhibition will put you straight on that. It'll also let you know they were also probably the most well-used of the era's developments.

"When Victoria came to the crown 75 million chargeable letters were mailed in this country." said Douglas Muir. "At the end of her reign there were well over 2000 million letters, 400 million postcards and 80 million parcels sent, that’s quite an achievement."

This small display is a mere taste of the vast collection owned and cared for by the BPMA. Currently without a permanent visitor centre to show off its entire collection, the organisation is building towards opening a new premises in 2009.

Until then, displays such as this one will continue to provide a glimpse of these hidden treasures as will virtual exhibitions on the BPMA website.