The post office and its story

by Edward Bennett

The actual foundation is only 3 feet in depth, and not one of the floors is more than 3½ inches in thickness.

Between the two blocks is a loading and unloading yard for the mails, and on the west side of the second block is a large yard and unoccupied space left for such future additions as may be required for growth of work. The Post Office is learning from experience the value of the margin, and that there is no finality in its advances. It is in this open space below the level of the ground where is to be found the section of the Roman wall which I have described.

The public office is the central office in London for the transaction by the public of all classes of postal and telegraphic business. It is the largest public post office in the country, and measures 152 feet by 52 feet, with a counter running the whole length. The inside walls are lined throughout with marble; a green Irish marble being used for the dado, pilasters, panels, door architraves, and the front of the counter, and a light Italian marble for the remainder. The pilasters and piers have bases and capitals of bronze, and bronze is also used for the counter edges, table edges, and electric light fittings.

All this is unaccustomed magnificence for a London post office, and he must be a man singularly deficient in a sense of the fitness of things who can enter these marble halls and boldly go up to the bronze-edged counter and ask for a halfpenny stamp.

Under the public office is the posting room, into which falls the correspondence posted in the big letter-boxes by the public. It is interesting to stand in this room and watch the postal packets pouring down the shoot from the letter-boxes. There begins the first stage of the travels of a letter. Everything that machinery and science can do to economise labour and to facilitate delivery and despatch is brought into play. Sorting is simply continual subdivision, and it is interesting to watch the journeyings of the letters from the moment of posting in the big letter-box. There is very little carriage from one place to another by hand. Cable conveyors and band conveyors, worked much on the same principle as the moving platforms we have all seen at exhibitions and great emporiums, carry the letters from point to point until each letter finds its appointed bag, and is either taken out of the building by the City postman or deposited in a mail cart which takes it to the railway station or district office.

A band conveyor takes the letters from the posting room which are addressed to places in London or abroad, to the ground floor of the building in baskets, and the empty baskets are sent down by a return band. The correspondence for the provinces, which is dealt with at a large sorting office at Mount Pleasant, nearly a mile away, is put into bags, and another band conveyor takes these bags to the departure platform at the west end of the sorting office. There is a third band conveyor suspended from the ceiling of the same floor, which is for the conveyance of bags of mails from the east to the west of the sorting office.

The London letters and those for abroad are conveyed to the ground floor, which is occupied by the E.C. district sorting office. The letters are brought to the eastern end of the immense room and with them are bags of letters which have arrived from provincial offices and abroad, amounting altogether to upwards of five millions weekly.

The posted letters are arranged in order for stamping on what are called facing tables, on which running bands are placed, and at the end of these tables are electric stamping machines which can obliterate the stamps on the letters up to a rate of 700 or 800 per minute. Then the letters pass into two main divisions. On the northern[northern] side correspondence for all parts of London, except the E.C. district, is dealt with, and direct despatches are made to every chief district and sub-district delivery office in London for every delivery during the day. On the southern side the postmen prepare the correspondence for the twelve daily deliveries in the E.C. district. Upwards of 1400 postmen are attached to this office. A noticeable feature of the work of sorting is that the letters travel from east to west always, and at the west end is the platform from which bags for other offices are despatched.

The first floor is entirely devoted to the treatment of correspondence for the Colonies and abroad. About 900 officers of all grades are employed upon the work and about 400,000 articles are despatched weekly. The work is brought up by lifts from the eastern platform.

The principle here is also continual subdivision, and there are upwards of 1000 different post offices for which direct bags are made up nightly in the Foreign Section. A striking feature of this section to the visitor is the varied colouring of the big mail bags intended for over-sea mails. If the foreign sailor cannot read he can appreciate colour, and he will know the destination of a mail bag by its colour.