The Post Office and Its Story. Edward Bennett
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.
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