Site of Poulters' Hall - King Edward Street EC1A

King Edward Building in the

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London f ...

was London's main

Post Office 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 ser ...

for most of the 20th century and also the main

sorting office A sorting office or processing and distribution center (P&DC; name used by the United States Postal Service (USPS)) is any location where postal operators bring mail after collection for sorting into batches for delivery to the addressee, which ...

for the London EC postal area and for overseas mail. Designed by

Sir Henry Tanner Sir Henry Tanner (1849–1935) was a prominent British architect during the late 19th and early 20th century, working for HM Office of Works. History Tanner was born in St Pancras, London 1849 to Robert Tanner, a master carpenter and Elizabe ...

, it was opened in 1910 and closed in the 1990s. The complex had entrances on both

King Edward Street King Edward Street is a street running between the High Street to the north and Oriel Square to the south in central Oxford, England. To the east is the "Island" site of Oriel College, one of the colleges of Oxford University. To the west ...

and Newgate Street. The 'London Chief Office' on King Edward Street was the largest public post office in the UK.

History

In 1905 King

Edward VII Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910. The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and ...

laid the foundation stone of a new building for the General Post Office on

. Standing opposite the Post Office Headquarters building, which had opened in 1895, King Edward Building was designed to take over the remaining functions of GPO East (the old Post Office headquarters on St. Martin's Le Grand). King Edward Building opened in 1910, after which GPO East was closed and subsequently demolished. The sizeable new King Edward Building complex was built on what had been the site of

Christ's Hospital Christ's Hospital is a public school (English independent boarding school for pupils aged 11–18) with a royal charter located to the south of Horsham in West Sussex. The school was founded in 1552 and received its first royal charter in 1553. ...

. It extended back over a considerable area (some including yards and loading bays) from King Edward Street to

Giltspur Street Giltspur Street is a street in Smithfield in the City of London, running north–south from the junction of Newgate Street, Holborn Viaduct and Old Bailey, up to West Smithfield, and it is bounded to the east by St Bartholomew's Hospital. I ...

. The complex housed the main sorting offices for London (EC district) and for the GPO's Foreign Section, and also served as London's principal public post office. Behind the façade on King Edward Street, the main hall on the ground floor was 'lavishly decorated in marble and bronze' and contained a grand post office counter extending the full length of the room. The floors above were occupied by the offices of the Controller of the London Postal Service, while the basement contained the posting room, into which letters posted through slots in the wall above arrived via chutes, and departed (after preliminary sorting) via a system of conveyors. Behind the Chief Office on King Edward Street, and connected to it via bridges over loading and unloading yards, stood the large sorting office building (which was likewise designed by Tanner). EC district mail was sorted on the ground floor, and foreign/colonial correspondence on the first floor. In both cases, letters arrived at the east end of the building and progressed through it westwards. The sorting office had its main entrance on Newgate Street, similar in style to the building on King Edward Street. To the west of the sorting office was another yard, from which the mail was dispatched having been sorted into bags; beyond which space was left empty in anticipation of future expansion. (In the course of construction remains of the old

London Wall The London Wall was a defensive wall first built by the Romans around the strategically important port town of Londinium in AD 200, and is now the name of a modern street in the City of London. It has origins as an initial mound wall and ...

, including a bastion, were discovered here; the bastion was preserved ''in situ''). Despite its Portland stone and

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...

facings, the King Edward Building was entirely constructed on the Hennebique system using reinforced concrete, and as such represents a very early example of the use of reinforced concrete for a major public building in the UK. In 1923 a statue by Edward Onslow Ford of Sir Rowland Hill was set up outside the building on King Edward Street, having been moved from its original location by the Royal Exchange (where it had been erected in 1882). It is inscribed with the words 'He founded uniform

penny postage The Penny Post is any one of several postal systems in which normal letters could be sent for one penny. Five such schemes existed in the United Kingdom while the United States initiated at least three such simple fixed rate postal arrangements. U ...

- 1840'. King Edward Building was one of the original stations on the Post Office Railway, which opened in 1927 to provide a subterranean mail transport link between several different district and sorting offices. In 1966 the National Postal Museum was established in part of the King Edward Building, and an expanded museum was formally opened there by Queen Elizabeth II in 1969. The King Edward Building remained in use until the mid-1990s. For much of the century it had offered a counter service 24 hours a day, but it closed to the public in April 1994. For two years it continued to operate as the Royal Mail City and International Office, until July 1996 when these functions were transferred to

Mount Pleasant Sorting Office The Mount Pleasant Mail Centre (often shortened as Mount Pleasant, known internally as the Mount and officially known as the London Central Mail Centre) is a mail centre operated by Royal Mail in London, England. The site has previously operated ...

; this left only the Postal Museum on site, until its closure two years later. In 1997 it was confirmed that the main King Edward Building had been sold to Merrill Lynch & Co., who went on to convert it into their London office. Both sections of the old King Edward's Building (the London Chief Office and the Sorting Office) are Grade II*

listed buildings In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

References

{{coord, 51.5164, -0.0989, type:landmark_region:GB, display=title Postal history of the United Kingdom Postal system of the United Kingdom General Post Office Infrastructure in London Post office buildings in the United Kingdom

History

See also

References