Enlivening legal education through The Postal Museum

The Postal Museum repository is alive. Image © Amanda Perry-Kessaris, 2025.

We (Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Emily Allbon, and archivist Susannah Coster) are partnering with  The Postal Museum and a team of academic Collaborators to explore how we can use archives and museum collections to enliven legal education.

We are beginning with an experiment: co-designing a set of ‘sparks’–expert, accessible, commentaries–which link specific items from The Postal Museum Collections to each of the core law subjects (contract, criminal, tort, public, land, trusts, EU). These sparks will be directed to educators, students, and members of the public working from A-Level upwards. They will be made freely available online via Lawbore, the leading directory to resources for those studying law. We hope to scale up the project to include other law subjects over time.

Our ambition is to help to make the law, and the Collections, engaging and accessible to a wide range of people. 

Why The Postal Museum?

The Postal Museum Collections contain over 60,000 objects and thousands of records from The Royal Mail Group Plc and The Post Office Ltd. They form one of the oldest business archives in the world, with items dating back 500 years.

These institutions, and their earlier iterations, have long played central roles in public and private life in the United Kingdom and beyond, including as employers, communicators, regulators, distributors, and community hubs. So the Collections offer a surprisingly diverse range of rich and engaging pathways through which to explore law at the individual, local, national, and international levels; and from multiple perspectives. 

Process

This Project is an experiment. We will share our process here as it evolves.

We are currently in Phase A of the Project. It has three stages:

• Stage 1: Identify a selection of items in The Postal Museum Collections that might be suitable for further exploration as the focus for a ‘Spark’ (Autumn 2025).
• Stage 2: Explore those items in a hands-on collaborative research workshop the Postal Museum (Spring 2026)
• Stage 3: Write up and disseminate Sparks (Summer and Autumn 2026)

Phase B will focus on dissemination and impact.

Outputs

We designed this Initial Search Guide in October 2025 to support Collaborators in shortlisting items in Stage 1.

Collaborators

Our academic Collaborators are:

• Danon Pritchard
• Diamond Ashiagbor
• Emma Jones
• Fred Motson
• Hamsa Jayanathan
• Hannah Philips
• Laura Charleton
• Shaun McVeigh
• Siddharth de Souza
• Ting Xu

They were selected from via an open call issued in Summer 2025, which asked applicants to answer the following questions:

• You can tell that I am committed to legal education because…
• The core law subject that I am most passionate about is…
• My favourite and least favourite things about teaching law are…
• This project caught my attention because… 
• The people that I am most interested in reaching through this project are…

Find out more

To find out more about:

• Items held in the Collections, how they can be accessed, and how the expert collections staff can help you, visit The Postal Museum Collections website.
• Social engagement and impact work at The Postal Museum see Voices of Resistance: Slavery and Post in the Caribbean, which was nominated for a Museums Association Museums Change Lives Award.
• How legal researchers have, with the support of archivist Susannah Coster, used the Collections in the past, see the Fantasy Legal Exhibitions project led by Amanda Perry-Kessaris and Victoria Barnes in 2023.
• How designerly ways can enhance education, listen to this conversation about Design in Legal Education, a visually rich, experience-led book that Emily and Amanda co-edited in 2022.