The Stamp Lady of Cheshire: Emma Moores

30 July 2026

The Stamp Lady of Cheshire: why Emma Moores is on a mission to make stamps anything but boring

Phil

PHIL ROBERTS
THE MORNING SHOW

There’s a funny thing that happens when you’ve only ever met someone online and then they walk into your studio. You both go, “Oh… hello again.”

Which is exactly what Emma Moores and I did this week. We’d chatted plenty over the internet, but this was the first time she’d sat across from me in the flesh — and honestly, she’s even friendlier in real life. Her words, not mine: “It’s the medication that’s working.” Aren’t we all, Emma. Aren’t we all.

You might know her better as The Stamp Lady of Cheshire. A title she wasn’t sure about at first — she reckoned it sat somewhere near “the old bag lady” — but it’s stuck now, and she’s grown to rather like it. It all started at a business planning day, where she got talking about stamps, someone christened her The Stamp Lady, and the name followed her everywhere after that. She’s now The Stamp Lady on TikTok too. She is, in her own words, everywhere.

Forget the Penny Black — these aren’t your grandad’s stamps

One of my colleagues collared Emma before we went on air and started banging on about the Penny Black, and she had to gently break it to him that she doesn’t do the old, dusty stuff.

Emma deals in current stamps — the ones Royal Mail issue fresh every month — and sends them out to her collectors with a proper “did you know?” fact attached to each one.

And she is brilliant at a did-you-know. My sister is still talking about the Monopoly one.

Here’s the short version: Monopoly wasn’t dreamed up during the Great Depression by the chap who took the credit at all. It was actually invented by a woman in America — a stenographer named Lizzie Magie — who filed her patent for “The Landlord’s Game” back in 1903. A man later claimed he’d created it himself, and got all the glory for decades. But that’s not even the best bit.

During the Second World War, our own Waddingtons teamed up with British intelligence to smuggle silk escape maps, tiny compasses and real cash inside Monopoly sets, which were then posted to prisoners of war to help them escape. All hidden in a board game. I did not know that. Cracking pub quiz material, that.

That’s Emma’s whole point, really: a stamp is a fountain of knowledge in one little picture.

Stranger Things, Duran Duran and a moth or two

If you think stamps are all steam trains and remembrance, think again.

This year alone Royal Mail have put out Stranger Things, Concorde, Hornby model railways and a gorgeous Lord of the Rings set — which taught Emma that Tolkien’s epic took him the best part of twelve years, was never meant to be a trilogy at all, and only got split into three books because paper was so pricey after the war.

We’ve also had waterfalls, moths in July, military jet aircraft landing at the end of the month, and Duran Duran on the way later this year.

Emma reckons the sheer variety is perfect if, like her, you’re neurodivergent and have “the attention span of a gnat” — a fresh topic every month, a new little dopamine hit of knowledge each time.

I know the feeling.

Getting kids off the screens, one letter at a time

Here’s where Emma really lights up. A former English teacher of fifteen years, she’s built a children’s subscription (aimed at roughly seven to fourteen-year-olds) that teaches them about the world through the theme of each month’s stamps — waterfalls, moths, jets, whatever’s next. They get a first day cover to collect, an activity booklet, and a blank envelope to decorate and actually post.

Why? Because — and this floored me — a lot of kids don’t know how to write a letter, address an envelope, or even stick a stamp on. Emma’s own son, now 21, went off to university and bought a glue stick to attach his stamps. Bless him. So the pack includes sentence starters, encourages a bit of old-fashioned letter writing, and the dream is to eventually pair the children up as pen pals.

There’s a lovely mental-health thread running through all of it, too.

Emma’s a big believer in “stopping the scroll” — stepping away from the noise and the lights and the endless feed, taking a breath, and learning something new the slow way. As she put it, sometimes we just need a bit of quiet time. Couldn’t agree more.

Where to find Emma

You’ll find The Stamp Lady over at first-day-cover.com and she’s genuinely everywhere else too — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, plus her Snippets on Stamps for little bite-sized facts.

She’s back on the show in September to talk us through the next theme, and I cannot wait.

I could talk to her for hours!

Emma Moores, everyone — the one and only Stamp Lady of Cheshire.