How Britain is Changing with King Charles III

It was a pack of stamps that made the coming changes feel particularly real to me. I’d just bought them and was putting them on postcards when I stopped to think about the Queen’s face. They were so familiar that I usually didn’t really process who was on them. That was simply what stamps looked like.

This was September 2022, after Queen Elizabeth II’s death and funeral, and I was trying to understand what a new King would mean for everyday life. I’d lived in the UK for six years and had never experienced a change like this. Some things had already happened in front of me; others were still things I was wondering about.

A proclamation in town

I saw a proclamation happen in town without initially knowing what was going on. I thought it was the mayor who came out in traditional clothing and spoke about the Queen’s passing and the transition to the new King. Then everyone sang “God Save the King”.

I’d never heard that version of the song before. I’d enjoyed history at school, and watching this felt like something I would normally read about in a textbook. Instead, it was happening in front of me, in town. I found it difficult to put that experience into words.

The Queen had been on the throne for my entire life and my mom’s life, and for longer than my father had been alive. I thought some of the shock around her death came from that sense of her always having been there. Her age wasn’t the only thing people were reacting to.

A familiar face on the post

My monthly postcards to some of my Patreon supporters brought the subject into a very ordinary task. I had international stamps and a whole pack of first-class ones, and as I unwrapped the stamps I’d recently bought, I realised their appearance would change.

I didn’t understand how Royal Mail would go about it or what would happen to the stamps I already had. I was wondering about timelines and whether there might be an exchange process, rather than having an answer. Something as small as sticking stamps on postcards had made me think about how life here would change.

After stamping the cards, I’d walk to a postbox, which raised another question. What happened to the royal cypher, the monarch’s identifying design, on those? From what I’d read online at the time, existing boxes were expected to stay as they were, with the new King’s cypher appearing on new ones when needed.

I’d also learned that some boxes still carried a previous King’s cypher. That was a detail I hadn’t known before. It made sense of the idea that you could carry on using an old box while new ones reflected a different reign.

The change in our jar

I didn’t often buy things with cash by then, but we had a little money jar at home. Whenever we had spare coins or notes, we put them there rather than carrying them around. Looking at that familiar money brought up the same question as the stamps, because it had the Queen’s profile on it.

I could imagine it being a huge undertaking to introduce a new face on currency, but I didn’t know how long it would take. I’d never watched that process happen before. At that point I was reflecting on the scale of it, rather than describing a completed changeover.

These were the everyday things that had caught my attention while so much else was happening. Change could feel scary, and I thought many people were feeling uncertain and overwhelmed. I’d never lived through this before either, and in September 2022 I could only wonder what the future would look like.

Editor’s historical check, 2 October 2026: Royal Mail’s statement dated 16 September 2022 said existing postboxes would remain unchanged. Its stamp-validity deadline related to the separate introduction of barcodes, rather than the Queen’s death. Alanna’s questions above record her uncertainty at the time; they are not current postage instructions.

Watch my original video about the everyday changes I wondered about when Charles became King.