In twenty years the need for extension became again pressing, and in 1895 the huge building known as G.P.O. North was opened. G.P.O. West was then given up to the Telegraph Service, and all the administrative offices were transferred to G.P.O. North. But these three immense buildings even in 1894 were by no means large enough to hold all the activities of the Post Office. The Parcel Post, the Money and Postal Order Departments, and the Post Office Savings Bank Department were all housed in other parts of the City of London, and there were overflow premises in streets near St. Martin's le Grand.
In this chapter we are only concerned with St. Martin's le Grand, and it is not without regret for the severance of old ties that Londoners witnessed in 1910 the closing of Smirke's fine post office, and the migration of the staff to King Edward's Building, henceforth to be the home of the London Postal Service. Not a hundred years had passed since the move from Lombard Street, and the Post Office had become a small nation of itself. And this body of men and women has for years regarded St Martin's le Grand as the metropolis of their nation, and when they have stood under the big clock which has seen so many mails arrive and depart, they have felt that they were citizens of no mean city.
CHAPTER IV
KING EDWARD'S BUILDING
In every big town the post office is now one of the most important, while in some cases it is the most imposing of all the local public buildings. Here the head postmaster is to be found, and here all the post office business of the district is administered. People have often asked me, “Who is the postmaster of London?” They understand that the Postmaster-General and the Secretary have their offices at St. Martin's le Grand, but it is evident that these gentlemen are the supreme heads of the whole Post Office system, and are not specially concerned with London. “Is there not a postmaster of London, just as there is one of Birmingham and of Liverpool?” The answer is that there is a London head postmaster, but his official title is Controller of the London Postal Service. Until a comparatively recent period he shared a building with the Postmaster-General and Secretary, and the dignity of his office was perhaps a little obscured by the presence of the greater luminaries. Latterly, however, the old building at St. Martin's le Grand became practically the chief London post office, and all the big administrative departments moved to the other side of the road. But old associations take long to die, and I do not think that even Post Office servants have ever looked upon the old building as belonging specially to London; they have thought of it still as a portion of the big administrative department which has monopolised so much of the district of St. Martin's le Grand.
It is not therefore merely a fancy of my own that for the first time London possesses in King Edward's Building a head post office which is worthy of her, and which bears the same relations to the London district as the post office in Liverpool does to the Liverpool district. London is the biggest city in the world; it now possesses the biggest post office in the world. That is as it should be. It is London's chief office in a way that the old building never was. It has been built for London, and is fitted up entirely to meet the needs of London. Nobody who knows the old building could have said this of the inconvenient and out-of-date structure which was built for other times and other purposes.
The site of the new building covers ground which up to the beginning of the thirteenth century was one of the numerous vacant spaces in the north-west portion of the area enclosed by the Roman wall which went round the City of London. This wall, it is conjectured, was built between A.D. 350 and A.D. 369, only about half a century before Rome withdrew her legions from Britain. It belongs, therefore, to the later period of the Roman occupation of this country. A large section of this wall was discovered by the workmen when digging the foundations for King Edward's building, and it extended for about 400 feet. Most of this had to be destroyed and carried away, but a fine bastion at the western angle has been preserved, and can be inspected by visitors. The wall is built in the usual Roman method, and is composed of Kentish ragstone from the Maidstone district. In the ditch which ran outside the wall were discovered a number of Norman and mediæval relics, and within the wall many Roman remains. The section of wall laid bare by the workmen was found underneath the playground and dining-hall of Christ's Hospital, known to us all as the Bluecoat School. The school removed from the building some years ago into the country, and the site was then sold and divided between Bartholomew's Hospital and the General Post Office.
The foundation stone of the new post office was laid by King Edward VII. on the 10th October 1905, and it was opened for public business on the 7th November 1910. The building is constructed of Portland cement concrete, strengthened by bars of steel, on what is known as the Hennibique reinforced concrete system, and it is the largest building that has yet been erected on this plan. It is an all-in-one-piece building, fashioned out of Thames ballast and cement. Not a single steel joist has been used in the centre construction. Barge after barge from Rotherhithe landed at Blackfriars the mud chalk and gravel which dredgers had scooped up in the lower reaches of the Thames. This ballast was carted direct to King Edward Street, passed through a machine which sorts the stones into various sizes, and then turned into liquid concrete by another wonderful machine which mixes sand, cement, and stones together at a rapid rate. The steel rods and bars interlacing one another extend in a network throughout the building like the skeleton of an animal, while the entire system is embedded in a perfectly connected sheath of concrete. The great feature in this system is the immense reduction in wall thickness. The effect is seen in the lightness and airy nature of the building; one's first impression is that it is certainly not built for eternity, as somebody said the granite structures of Aberdeen are.
But this is an illusion: the concrete increases in strength as time goes on, and the passing years only make the building stronger and more capable of resisting weather and the strain of the loads which it has daily to carry.
Wattles and mud were the building materials of our remote ancestors, and it has been said that we are reverting to the old method, only British mud has given place to British concrete, concrete of Thames ballast and Portland cement. The outer walls are only 7 inches thick, but the frontages to King Edward Street and Newgate Street are faced with Portland stone with granite plinths. To see fully the effect of the reinforced concrete in building one has to examine the back elevations, where there are no stone facings. But even with its false but ornamental front the building has nothing of “the solemn and spacious Greek charm of the delightful old front in St. Martin's le Grand.” The Post Office gains in spaciousness and utility what it loses in architectural beauty.
The building consists at present of two parts, a block facing King Edward Street which contains, on the ground floor, the new Public Office, and on the four upper floors the offices of the Controller of the London Postal Service. The other is a much larger block containing the main sorting offices both for foreign and colonial correspondence, and for the E.C. or City district.