General Post Office, London

Before the establishment of the General Post Office, post houses were set up in the City of London and elsewhere to provide horses for the conveyance of individuals or messages on behalf of the royal court. In 1526 a warrant was issued to the Court of Aldermen requiring a number of horses to be kept on hand if required for the King's Post; they in turn arranged with the innkeeper of the Windmill in Old Jewry to ensure that four horses would be kept available for those wishing to ride post, along with four more to be provided by the local hackney men (who kept horses for hire). By the mid-17th century, there were separate post houses in London at the start of each of the post roads (which ran from London to different parts of the kingdom), including one in Bishopsgate for the route to Edinburgh, one at Charing Cross for the road to Plymouth and one in Southwark for the Dover road; these were invariably attached to licensed premises (where horses were customarily stabled). At this time the general administration of the Inland post and the Foreign post seems to have been carried out either from the houses of their chief officers, or else from one or other of the City's post houses. By 1653, though, a General Letter Office had been established 'at the Old Post House at the lower end of Threadneedle Street, by the Stocks'. This was a substantial building, which provided accommodation as well as office space for a number of Post Office officials. It was, however, destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666; following which the business of the Post Office was carried on from a series of temporary offices in various locations. ==General Post Office, Lombard Street==

). In 1678, the General Post Office found a more permanent home in a mansion in Lombard Street, belonging to Sir Robert Vyner; (the Post Office initially rented the property, before finally purchasing it from the Vyner family in 1705). The Post Office on Lombard Street was built around a central courtyard, which was open to the public and accessed through an imposing gateway. Directly opposite the entrance stood the sorting office, with the letter carriers' office located in the basement below. To the left was the foreign letter office, while to the right was the Board Room, which was connected to the official residence of the Postmasters General. The General Post Office remained in Lombard Street for a century and a half, during which time it continued to expand into neighbouring properties; however the increased employment of mail coaches towards the end of the 18th century caused difficulties as there was very little space for them to pull up and they were forced to queue in the narrow street. With the post office having this outgrown its premises in Lombard Street a site was sought for a new building. The City of London and Westminster Streets and Post Office Act 1815 (55 Geo. 3. c. xci) authorised commissioners to identify a suitable location, and to pay compensation to the owners of properties on the site. A parcel of land on the east side of St. Martin's Le Grand was chosen; however the clearance and preparation of the densely occupied site took several years, and it was only in May 1824 that the stones of the new building began to be laid. ==General Post Office, St Martin's Le Grand==

, showing the main west façade on St Martin's Le Grand. Smirke's new General Post Office opened on 23 September 1829. It was the UK's second purpose-built post office; Dublin's GPO (completed in 1818 to a design by Francis Johnston and still in use) predates it. The new Post Office was 'one of the largest public edifices now existing in the City of London' in 1829. Design and operation The Post Office was built in the Grecian style with Ionic porticoes along the main (west) front, and was long and wide and high. Mail coaches and mail carts The General Post Office was built in the era of the mail coach, with a driveway leading around the back of the building to a courtyard on the north side where the coaches would assemble. Each night, from all around the country, London-bound mail coaches would set off at different times, so as to arrive at St Martin's Le Grand between 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning; the mail was then unloaded and sorted, ready for delivery at 8am. Then in the evening, the coaches were loaded with sacks of mail destined for the provinces. The daily departure of the mail coaches regularly attracted crowds of spectators. At 8pm, Monday-Saturday, all the coaches would set off in different directions from St Martin's Le Grand; each would follow its own set route, progressively dropping off mail bags at every post town on the way to its final destination. There were no deliveries or collections of any kind on Sundays. The Grand Public Hall Behind the central portico of the Post Office was a Grand Public Hall, forming a public thoroughfare from St Martin's-le-Grand to Foster Lane; it measured by and had aisles on either side separated from the centre by rows of ionic columns. Members of the public could post letters and other items from inside the hall through boxes in the wall, from where they would fall into hoppers and be loaded into trolleys to be taken to the sorting offices beyond. There were also windows and offices where payments could be made. Each day, shortly before 6pm (the deadline for the Inland post), there would always be a last-minute rush of people with letters and newspapers to post; the windows above the slots were then opened to facilitate delivery, but were always closed on the sixth stroke of the clock (after which items could be posted at the 'late' window, but only with payment of a surcharge). Charles Dickens described the daily 6 o'clock rush in a descriptive and detailed article on the workings of the Post Office in 1850. A tunnel and conveyor system beneath the Grand Public Hall linked the two halves of the building. It was here that letters for and from the provinces were received, stamped, counted and sorted. The room was a hive of activity at the start of the day, when coaches arrived from around the country laden with letters for London; and at the end of the day, when the letters from London were sorted and stamped before being bagged, and loaded on coaches for delivery to provincial post offices all round the country. Here, each morning, the letter-carriers would sort their designated letters into different 'walks' before setting off to deliver them. Letters destined for addresses in central London were delivered by the Inland department's own letter-carriers, while those for the suburbs were sent on the under-floor conveyor to the London District office for delivery. Connected with the Inland department was the Ship Letter Office, which transported mail by sea to certain destinations using privately owned ships (at a cheaper rate than the Government-owned packet boats, which were overseen by a different office in the other half of the building). Likewise the West India Office and the North American Office, which were adjacent to the Inland Letter Office and managed the transport of mail to and from parts of the British Empire. Changes and developments Almost as soon as it had opened, the building was found to be short of space. 1830s As early as 1831, a gallery was inserted into the main Inland sorting office to provide extra capacity. The Inland Office now used horse-drawn mail-vans to convey sacks of letters to the railway termini where they were loaded on to trains or Travelling Post Offices. To help with the increased volume of post, a new sorting office was built immediately above the old one, 'suspended from a strong arched iron girder roof by iron rods' (a solution which, though ingenious, left the principal room below entirely deprived of natural light). The Money Order Office had been established in 1838, in two small rooms at the north end of the building. In the 1840s it operated from a large room adjoining the Public Hall on the south side near the main entrance; but it soon outgrew these premises and in 1846 the Money Order Office was provided with new premises (designed by Sydney Smirke) just across the road at No. 1 Aldersgate Street. At around the same time the Foreign Letter Office was made an adjunct to the Inland Letter Office (both administratively and physically): an arch was inserted in the north wall of the Inland Office beyond which several rooms were knocked together to create a new sorting office for the 'Colonial and Foreign Division' (measuring by ), which was linked by way of a mail-hoist to the Ship-letter Office above. Work requiring bright light was conducted in poorly illuminated areas, odours spread from the lavatories to the kitchens, while a combination of gas lighting and poor ventilation meant that workers often felt nauseous. From 1868, the GPO experimented with the services of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, which operated a pneumatic tube from Euston railway station for the delivery of mail, but the experiment was unsuccessful and terminated in 1874. In 1870, with space in the building remaining at a premium, the Grand Public Hall was closed and converted into another additional sorting room; slots were then installed under the portico for members of the public to post their letters. As part of these alterations a new upper floor was inserted along the double-height length of the hall to provide more space for the sorting of newspapers. ==Additional buildings==

GPO West In 1874, a new building, designed by James Williams, was opened on the western side of St. Martin's Le Grand: GPO West. It had originally been designed to house the main administrative offices and senior GPO officials on the lower two floors, and the Post Office Savings Bank on the upper two floors (leaving the old building to focus on letters and newspapers); but following the nationalisation of the UK's electrical telegraph companies in 1870, the upper floors were given over to telegraphic equipment and the building became known as the Central Telegraph Office (CTO). The instrument rooms employed nearly a thousand people at a time sending and receiving messages; the basement served as a battery room, with space for 40,000 cells. By this time the Central Hall on the ground floor had been converted to serve as the main pneumatic tube room, while the second, third and fourth floors were occupied by the instrument rooms of the electric telegraph systems. In 1896, the headquarters of the GPO's new Telephone section was established in GPO West, in rooms vacated by the senior officials and administrative staff (who had recently moved into their own separate building). GPO South Meanwhile, in 1880, a new building opened a quarter of a mile to the south in Queen Victoria Street; it initially accommodated the Post Office Central Savings Bank. Known as Post Office Headquarters (PHQ), it was designed by Henry Tanner to house the Postmaster General and the GPO's administrative departments (the Secretary's Office, the Accountant General's Office, the Solicitor's Office, etc.). To make way for the new building the old Bull and Mouth Inn was demolished, where at one time the mail coaches had been harnessed to their horses ready to collect the mail from the Post Office across the road. The building had a large courtyard at its centre, entered via covered passageways at either end. The outer arched entrances were topped with sculptural likenesses of two recent Postmasters General: H. C. Raikes (facing St Martin's Le Grand) and Arnold Morley (overlooking King Edward Street); while the equivalent arches on the courtyard side had representations of David Plunket and George Shaw Lefevre (recent First Commissioners of Works). The Postmaster General had his office on the ground floor, on the King Edward Street side; the Permanent Secretary and his staff were on the first floor. Beneath the courtyard was a large basement designed to hold the Post Office archives. ==GPO East==

Meanwhile, Robert Smirke's original General Post Office (which, to avoid confusion, had been renamed GPO East) continued to deal with letters and newspapers. When the parcel post was being introduced 1882, a sorting office was swiftly constructed for it by James Williams at basement level, extending into the Post Office yard; then in 1889 the parcel-post sorting office was relocated to Mount Pleasant. In 1893 an additional storey was added to the top of GPO East. Nevertheless, the 1896 report of the Tweedmouth Committee on Post Office Establishments declared the building to be 'incommodious, insanitary and overcrowded'. The following year it was decided 'to reconstruct the building within the present outer walls'. To enable the rebuilding, the Inland and Newspaper sections of the General Post Office were transferred in 1900 to a new building on the Mount Pleasant site, leaving GPO East to focus on the sorting of London and Foreign correspondence. (At the same time, double-aperture pillar boxes began to be installed in central London, with one side for 'London and Abroad' and the other for 'Country' letters, in line with these new arrangements). In 1900, the Central London Railway was opened, with the nearest station to St. Martin's Le Grand being named Post Office. (Subsequently, in 1937, it was renamed St Paul's). Demolition and replacement In 1905, King Edward VII laid the foundation stone of a new building on King Edward Street, immediately to the west of GPO North (and designed, as the latter had been, by Henry Tanner). Opened as the King Edward Building (KEB) in 1910, it was envisaged as a replacement for Smirke's GPO East, housing the main sorting offices for London (EC district) and the Foreign Section, as well as serving as London's principal public post office. With the opening of the new King Edward Building, the original Smirke building was closed in 1910; two years later it was demolished. The intention had been to construct a new 'GPO East' on the site, to accommodate the GPO's still-expanding administrative staff; but although plans were drawn up these never came to fruition, and the land was eventually sold in 1923. ==Aftermath==

The St Martin's Le Grand area remained a hub for London's postal services well into the second half of the twentieth century. Subsequently a third block (Empire House) was added; all three remained in Post Office use until the late 1980s. opened as the new Central Telegraph Office in 1962; it closed in 1999 and has since been demolished. GPO West continued to operate as the Central Telegraph Office (CTO); it also housed the Engineering Department. It was damaged by an aerial bomb dropped by a zeppelin during the First World War, which disabled the inland telegraph system for several hours. During the Second World War, GPO West was twice severely damaged by incendiary bombs: first during the "Second Great Fire of London" on 29 December 1940, when the building was completely gutted, and then again in March 1942 (after the building had been repaired the previous year); it was subsequently rebuilt and restored to use, having been reduced in height from six storeys to two. In 1962, the Central Telegraph Office was relocated and GPO West went on to serve as overflow office accommodation for Post Office Headquarters staff; however it was later deemed unsafe and was demolished in 1967. The King Edward Building remained in use until the mid-1990s. Since 1927, it had been served by the Post Office Railway, which provided a subterranean mail transport link between several different district and sorting offices. For much of the century KEB had offered a counter service 24 hours a day, but it closed to the public in April 1994. The building was sold the following year. The demolition of Smirke's 1829 General Post Office was not unopposed, and there were moves at the time to salvage the central portico and pediment and rebuild them elsewhere (one suggested location being Shadwell Park). Other Ionic capitals from the portico found their way into the gardens at Hyde Hall, Sawbridgeworth, where they served as flower pots. ==See also==