The Mount Pleasant Mail Centre (often shortened as Mount Pleasant, known internally as the Mount [1] and officially known as the London Central Mail Centre) [2] is a mail centre operated by Royal Mail in London, England. The site has previously operated as one of the largest sorting offices in the world. [3] It is located in the London Borough of Islington, on the boundary with the London Borough of Camden.
It is located on a twelve-acre site in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, at the junction between Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue and opposite Exmouth Market.
The mail centre stands on the site of the former Coldbath Fields Prison that ceased to function in 1885. Its potential use for Post Office purposes was championed by Frederick Ebenezer Baines, Assistant Secretary of the General Post Office, who had been instrumental in establishing the parcel post service in 1882. [4]
In the mid-1880s the parcel sorting office was located in the cramped basement of GPO East in St. Martin's Le Grand; Baines was actively seeking to remove it, preferably to a spacious site close to some of the main London railway termini. The Coldbath Fields Prison site fitted these criteria. In 1887 the Treasury sanctioned the use of the former treadmill house as a temporary parcel sorting office, and the GPO moved in in time to meet the Christmas rush. The sale of the rest of the site had to wait until an Act of Parliament (the Post Office (Sites) Act (52 & 53 Vict. Ch. ccix)) was passed. The centre was then officially opened on 30 August 1889.
The Post Office clerks did not like the name Coldbath Fields, which was associated with the prison in the public mind, so Baines took the name Mount Pleasant from an adjacent street (the name-change being announced in November that year). [5] The street called Mount Pleasant had gained its name ironically in the 1730s after locals had begun to dump cinders and other refuse. [6]
The Post Office (Sites) Act 1889 required the Post Office to provide a portion of the site, or £10,000, to London County Council for use as open space. The Post Office chose to retain the entire site, and provided the funds, which were used to purchase Spa Green Gardens in Clerkenwell. [7]
To begin with the prison buildings were used to house various Post Office departments: the prison bakehouse became the office of the Post Office Stores Department, the Governor's house was used by the Telegraph Superintending Engineer (whose workshops expanded into other buildings in the eastern corner of the site); the Chapel housed a hundred clerks of the Money Order Office (with a similar number being accommodated in what had been the Governor's offices on the floors below), while the adjacent long cell-block was used for postal stores. [8] (The Money Order Office moved out in 1897 to temporary accommodation in Fore Street; whereupon the stores department moved into the Chapel and other vacated areas, and the cell-block was demolished.) [9]
Meanwhile, the Post Office began to erect its own buildings on the site (designed for the most part by Sir Henry Tanner, principal architect of the Office of Works): a Telegraph Factory was built in 1890 in the southern corner of the site; and from 1889-1900 a vast new Parcel Office was built, in stages from north to south, over the whole of the northern (north-west) half of the site. [4] (In spite of its name, the third and final section of the building was designed to accommodate the sorting of letters for the Inland section of the GPO, which was transferred here from St. Martin's Le Grand in 1900.) When finished the building was square in plan, with corner pavilions containing offices and ancillary services, and the central areas used for sorting. Two-thirds of the building was two storeys high, but the final section was double that height. On either side were glass-covered loading bays for the mail vans. [4]
Some of the original prison buildings survived into the 20th century. The prison gate was demolished in 1901 for an extension to the Telegraph Factory; but the Governor's house and the Chapel lasted through the First World War. Not long afterwards, however, they too were swept away (the Stores Department having moved out in 1915) for the building of a new Letter Sorting Office, designed by A. R. Myers, which was built (again in stages) across the southern half of the site, beginning in 1920. (The last vestiges of the prison were demolished in 1929.) In contrast to the red-brick Parcel Office, the new Letter Sorting Office was built in reinforced concrete; the eastern half was completed in 1926, the steel-framed western half in 1934. The Letter Sorting Office, said at the time to be the largest in Europe and the British Empire, was opened in November that year by the Duke and Duchess of York. It contained the latest mechanised equipment for sorting and distributing mail. [4] A public post office was built on the corner of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road as part of the same complex of buildings, which opened in 1937.
During the Second World War the Parcel Office was severely damaged by bombing raids in 1940 and 1943. By 1944 it had been rebuilt (at ground-floor level only) and brought back into use. An intended rebuild never took place, and eventually (in 1984) most of the parcel sorting was moved to Brent Cross and the remains of Tanner's building were demolished. Subsequently the northern half of the site has functioned mainly as a van park (the last remaining parcel work was removed from Mount Pleasant to Camden Town in 1996). [4]
From 1927 to 2003, Mount Pleasant was the central station and depot on the London Post Office Railway, which connected a number of Royal Mail offices and railways stations across London.
In 1979 Mount Pleasant pioneered the use of optical character recognition for sorting purposes with the installation of a machine.
The art-deco Letter Sorting Office building remains in use, albeit much altered, both externally (with plastic windows and cladding) [4] and internally.
In 2017 a new Postal Museum was opened on the site, located in Freeling House on the back of the sorting office. It provides public access below ground to the Post Office Railway depot, which now operates as a heritage railway.
The site is now the mail centre of the EC postcode area, the N postcode area, the W1 postcode district and the WC postcode area.
In 2012 Royal Mail proposed selling off the northern half of the site, together with land to the west (on the other side of Phoenix Place) for residential and commercial redevelopment. [10] [11] The sites being sold for redevelopment had been mainly used for operational and staff vehicle parking, which was to be relocated underground as part of the scheme. [12] The remaining operational part of the site was due to be modernised at the same time. [13]
After a protracted dispute over affordable housing, development of the site, to include some 680 homes and named 'Postmark', began in 2018. [14] The first phase, alongside Phoenix Place, was completed in 2021. The project as a whole is scheduled for completion in 2024. [15]
The Post Office Railway is a 2 ft narrow gauge, driverless underground railway in London that was built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, to transport mail between sorting offices. Inspired by the Chicago Tunnel Company, it opened in 1927 and operated for 76 years until it closed in 2003. A museum within the former railway was opened in September 2017.
A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional services, which vary by country. These include providing and accepting government forms, and processing government services and fees. The chief administrator of a post office is called a postmaster.
Clerkenwell is an area of central London, England.
Postal codes used in the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies are known as postcodes. They are alphanumeric and were adopted nationally between 11 October 1959 and 1974, having been devised by the General Post Office. A full postcode is known as a "postcode unit" and designates an area with several addresses or a single major delivery point.
The W postcode area, also known as the London W postcode area is a group of postcode districts covering part of central and part of West London, England. The area originates from the Western (W1) and Paddington (W2-14) districts of the London postal district. This area covers 35 postcode districts and around 18,554 live postcodes.
Farringdon Road is a road in Clerkenwell, London.
The E (Eastern) postcode area, also known as the London E postcode area, is the part of the London post town covering much of east London, England. It borders the N postcode area to the west, both north of the tidal Thames. Since closure of the East London mail centre, its mail is sorted at Romford Mail Centre together with IG and RM postcode areas.
The EC postcode area, also known as the London EC postal area, is a group of postcode districts in central London, England. It includes almost all of the City of London and parts of the London boroughs of Islington, Camden, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Westminster. The area covered is of very high density development. Deliveries for the EC postcode area are made from Mount Pleasant Mail Centre.
The WC postcode area, also known as the London WC postcode area, is a group of postcode districts in central London, England. The area covered is of high density development, and includes parts of the City of Westminster and the London Boroughs of Camden and Islington, plus a very small part of the City of London.
Terminal railway post offices were sorting facilities which were established by the Railway Mail Service to speed the distribution of parcel post. These offices were usually located in or near railroad stations in major cities or junction points. Terminal railway post offices operated generally from 1913-1914 into the mid-1960s, before their function was absorbed by post office sectional centers.
Coldbath Fields Prison, also formerly known as the Middlesex House of Correction and Clerkenwell Gaol and informally known as the Steel, was a prison in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, London. Founded in the reign of James I (1603–1625) it was completely rebuilt in 1794 and extended in 1850. It housed prisoners on short sentences of up to two years. Blocks emerged to segregate felons, misdemeanants and vagrants.
The Postal Museum is a postal museum run by the Postal Heritage Trust. It began in 2004 as The British Postal Museum & Archive and opened in Central London as The Postal Museum on 28 July 2017.
Postcodes in Australia are used to more efficiently sort and route mail within the Australian postal system. Postcodes in Australia have four digits and are placed at the end of the Australian address, before the country. Postcodes were introduced in Australia in 1967 by the Postmaster-General's Department and are now managed by Australia Post, Australia's national postal service. Postcodes are published in booklets available from post offices or online from the Australia Post website.
Clerkenwell (old) Prison, also known as the Clerkenwell House of Detention or Middlesex House of Detention was a prison in Clerkenwell, London, opened in 1847 and demolished in 1890. It held prisoners awaiting trial.
A sorting office or processing and distribution center is any location where postal operators bring mail after collection for sorting into batches for delivery to the addressee, which may be a direct delivery or sent onwards to another regional or local sorting office, or to another postal administration.
The General Post Office in St. Martin's Le Grand was the main post office for London between 1829 and 1910, the headquarters of the General Post Office of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and England's first purpose-built post office.
Chennai General Post Office (GPO) is located on Rajaji Salai at Parry's Corner, Chennai. It functions in a building built in 1884. It is located opposite to the Chennai Beach suburban railway station. Chennai GPO covers an area of about 23.33 km2 (9.01 sq mi) and serves a population of around 220,000. It has no sub-branch offices.
Cardiff Mail Centre is the main headquarters and sorting office for Royal Mail in Cardiff, Wales, and one of the main mail centres for the southwest of the United Kingdom.
Clerkenwell was an authorised underground railway station planned by the Metropolitan Railway but never built. It was to be located on Farringdon Road at Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell, London.
King Edward Building in the City of London was London's main Post Office for most of the 20th century and also the main sorting office for the London EC postal area and for overseas mail. Designed by Sir Henry Tanner, it was opened in 1910 and closed in the 1990s.
